Overcoming the ups and downs of the creative process

The beginnings of the 9-5 mentality are beginning to appear for the Students of the World team. Actually, it’s a bit more like 8:30-6. We’ve been producing rough video cuts to send to Children’s Safe Drinking Water, creating photo and Soundslide stories, writing op-eds and press releases, preparing recruitment plans and finding outlets to showcase our work in the Austin community. But while we get used to the office setting, we also realize that there’s a reason we sometimes come in early or stay late — we enjoy what we’re doing.

No other job has allowed me to work with a group of extremely talented peers on creative projects that we get to see through from beginning to end. The creativity that circulates through the office on a regular basis is an invigorating thing to experience, not to mention a push to increase my own creative output. But I would be lying if I said we’re always at the top of our creative game. Sometimes, at least for me, it feels like there’s not a creative bone in my body.

Of course, deadlines don’t go away because the team isn’t feeling its creative best. Instead, it leaves us wondering how best to continue working, how to push ourselves forward even when we don’t always feel up to it.

Our most recent challenge has been building a video piece from scratch, and essentially deciding how we want to tell the story. The film will eventually be our Children’s Safe Drinking Water submission for the Clinton Global Initiative. It will highlight CSDW’s prior CGI commitment, showing how it exceeded its goals and is continuing to provide support for those without safe drinking water. With that as a springboard,  our goal is to create a compelling, innovative film in under 90 seconds. For those of you with film experience, you probably know that 90 seconds isn’t as much time as you would like to tell a story. But take a look around and you’ll see that today’s media is becoming more fast-paced and varied than ever before, so it’s important to make your media stand out, and to do it quickly. We’re now in the process of experimenting with graphic animations, music, and creative uses of text to tell CSDW’s story in the best way possible.

Sometimes the creative spark is shining bright, and we see our ideas come together quite clearly. But there are times too when that vision isn’t as clear, and we must work as a team to overcome whatever obstacle is in our way and move forward. Ideas have been brought up, thought about, kept, trashed, put aside for later, and everything in between. The creative process is just that, a process, and we navigate it with varying success every day. For me, as cheesy and overdone as it is, a wall we encountered in Tanzania keeps me in the right mindset…

Photo by Nicole Bell

Advertisement