HEAD BLOG

Everything in life can be boiled down to a scene within a movie. Worse still, everything can be gently steered towards a scene within a movie.

This simple, but invasive truth is colouring every move I make.

When a friend tells me about teaching English as a foreign language I immediately think of the scene in Good Morning Vietnam where – well, if you don’t know it then chances are you should probably leave this blog for now.

Similarly when I’m mid-flow in an argument I might say something straight from a film. I do. I can’t help it. If the time is right then it just has to play out that way because it felt so good when I saw it played out by Pacino or, ummm… Cage.

It doesn’t stop there.

I’ve even steered an argument towards being able to deliver a line. I haven’t yet managed the “sell crazy someplace else” line but I know exactly how I could push someone towards it.

Clearly, there’s a problem.

The thing is, life and relationships are one thing. It’s easy to start arguments just to be able to deliver a killer line. Life and relationships aren’t serious enough to take steps to prevent myself from doing it.

But creativity, dear god creativity, is.

Imagine my horror, yes, the horror, the horror, as I stare at a piece of copy I’d spent five WHOLE minutes on writing only to realise that somebody else had written it before me.

It’s embarrassing is what it is.

It’s also an area to be keenly aware of throughout the creative process. Sometimes an idea can feel so good, so reassuringly familiar, that it must have been done before. And often it has.

Death is not the end of course and our culture is filled with talented people who make use of this creative saturation and make it their own. Look at Spaced – filled with snippets of other works it remains decidedly its own creature throughout. Self-awareness, keenly expressed, is its hallmark and its creative territory.

Then there is the love-him-or-hate-him Tarantino whose oeuvre is built upon references to popular (and not so popular) culture. Again though, it’s his own spin on these things. His own experience which is brought to bear upon the subject matter that makes the difference.

And that, in the end, is key. It is experience which guides our hand in all these matters. Personal experience. And that’s something that turns a mediocre argument into a divorce settlement.

There’s an element to creativity I don’t like: opinion. Specifically other people’s opinions. Idea killers the lot of them. Toil and polish falls away at a handful of words and that, I don’t like.

Of course opinion is also vital to creativity. All that toil and all that polish can get you lost in a dark place, namely up your own arse and that’s somewhere nobody should be lost.

Experience lessens the importance of the opinions of others. Over time a writer or artist learns the impact of their work and how it is interpreted by others. That wonderful, frightening word, “interpret” is certainly one to watch out for as readers bring their own approach to bear upon carefully crafted work. Yet, as I say, experience tempers this element and folds it into the substance of the work. Ambiguity is employed as a tool rather than left dangling, ready to unravel meaning, and technique becomes adept at preempting any dissent in the ranks.

Years ago, way before I’d learned any formal writing technique, a friend read over a poem of mine and said he didn’t much care for it. My work, he offered, was becoming too practised, too glib. I agonised over the comment (and still do) undecided whether it was a good thing. In part he meant the technique I was learning to apply, the structures I was reaching for that would enable me to direct ideas rather than just have them. But he also meant that he missed the roughness and energy a wider understanding of technique often smooths out.

I remember being captivated by The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It was a short novel filled with ideas and surprises. Little of his later work has ever matched that power; growing less with each novel. Many writers lose that edge as their technical ability to structure, to wordplay, increases. Ultimately, it is about how to balance the two and where and when to bring in opinion. After all, it is easy to spot a writer who has studied at UEA.

A cheap little app for the iPhone which was recommended to me by Matt Booth has got me looking at the world in a different way.

Just as the app itself had to look at the world differently.

It’s a camera app called Hipstamatic and anyone with a 3g will know that the camera on the iPhone isn’t something to throw away your Nikon over.

At just 1mb it is the sort of camera you avoid rather than include in your arsenal. It will do “ok” prints for a postcard but that’s about it.

So making use of it means making some big compromises if you like your photos glossy and printed onto canvas.

The makers of the app came up with an idea which makes perfect sense.

They modelled it on old style point and click cameras with old style film. That means you get a camera that adds in flaws of the kind you’d see by looking through your own childhood photos (I’m assuming you are born way before digital cameras came about).

It’s a fun way of making the most out of a camera with such limitations.

And it’s a great way of forcing yourself to look at the world differently.

I’ve been playing with black and white photography. I’ve done this on my dslr and enjoyed it well enough but now it’s a whole new thing. I’m looking more keenly at contrasts and compositions because I wonder what flaws they will produce once processes through Hipstamatic.

Waiting (sometimes even patiently) for the image to ‘develop’ is part of the fun because it means I can’t fire off twenty shots in a second and assume one has captured the moment.

Digital freed us all to become photographers. It’s been a wonderful gift and has produced amazing photos and amazing sites. But seeing and using Hipstamatic has made me understand what our perfect digital world loses in the rush for better quality images. It’s also taught me that dealing with obstacles in life is a route to producing amazing, insightful and thoughtful work.

I was seventeen years old, sat in an eighteenth century manor house and receiving the sort of English lesson normally reserved for twelve year olds.

The first day of an A-level English literature course ought to have been a baptism of fire. At least the way they used to teach it. Shakespeare was a given but Pope, Eliot (T S not George) and Bronte would demand close reading and F R Leavis would show us how.

That wasn’t how it started.

After a brief appraisal of literary terms our teacher decided to start again. This time at the very beginning. Read more…

No surprise when the Twitter stream was flooded with reactions from Flash Forward, the hot new show from David (Batman) Goyer and a show which was somehow bagged by Channel 5. And it was a solid start too. Similar enough to shows such as Lost, Heroes, Fringe and The 4400 for it to quickly nestle down in the arse-groove of our sofas. There were mysteries and clues, portentious looks and expositional dialogue a-plenty. Read more…

Facing the onset of a digital world is difficult for any brand but for a product built around the tactile joy of real-world building it must have been a challenge to dwarf the scale usually adopted by devotees of Lego. Read more…

Reading around a few of my favourite blogs today I happened upon this little gem from Rob over at the-ad-pit. Rob has an eye for effective advertising and, in his role as planner, obviously thinks a great deal about creativity, effectiveness and the role advertising plays in our lives. Read more…

An old boss of mine challenged me as to the effectiveness of packaging.

“I could put this product into paper bags and it would still sell” he declaimed. Read more…

My idea of heaven is quite basic. Requiring only a tatty old 3′x2′ wooden board from my childhood (the ‘drawing board’), a pile of clean, untouched paper, and a freshly sharpened pencil. The possibilities are endless. The very definition of a blank canvas. That’s my heaven. Read more…

A couple of days ago I spent the morning talking, reminiscing, postulating about the future – oh, and presenting work. The work was naturally fabulous but it was the conversations that really kept us talking on the journey home. Read more…