Creativity Through Technology

Over the past few months my best mate Tom has been living back at home after a break up which means he's had a lot more time to spend with me, which is great, I met Tom in the early days of learning to make films in college when we were around 17. Tom has continued to make films since he was 13 years old, but even though he's a great director and a much better screen writer, Tom has found himself stuck in corporate hell. He started a film making group in his early teens with the friends he made films with in his small rural village, and that group turned into a company, which is now a production company, and Tom works as a producer for most of the films they produce, and first AD's other productions to help pay the rent. He's become a well known name in producing and ADing in the South Wales independent film circuit, which is great, and his production company that I was once a part of is releasing two feature films next year. But Tom is now feeling the way I did a few years ago when I left, he feels uninspired, like this creative thing that has developed from his childhood is now this company that he feels obliged to keep running even though he's not actually creating his own work..

Anyway.. Tom's been staying over my house recently, and we've had proper sleep overs like kids would and we share ideas and watch extremely long lectures by Peter Greenaway and we get excited like were little kids about ideas that we have. Since I've been on this course and developing creative experiments Tom's been listening to what's been going on with me and has gotten excited, but also a bit sad that he hasn't been able to be this creative for a very long time. So we've created a little project where we've been experimenting with some of these ideas, and pouring a little bit more creativity into Tom's life. He's stiff, but he's slowly opening him self up to the idea of working differently, here's some of the outcomes and experiments we've been doing..

I started with a random object and made a quick video of me interacting with it with an invitation for Tom to respond to the video..

He responded eventually and I responded to that...

Anyway, the ideas are flowing, and we keep responding to each others quick responses, Tom's slowly loosening up and responding quicker, whether it be with text, drawing, sculpture, video, it's great to see Tom opening up to things other than film.

When Tom was over mine we did an experiment with random found objects, we laid them on the table and each took photos of the objects individually and arranged them into something else on an image editing app on our phones, we created worlds that we never would have created without that abstracted starting point.

This was taken straight from a lesson I took part in back during my Diploma, a lecture by Animator Sean Vicary. I could tell he wasn't too impressed with my result when I was done, I made a monster I think, with a plain background, it used a skull for the head and bones for the limbs.. Looking back I kind of get why he was a bit miffed at my effort.. I used things as what they actually were... could be seen as uncreative.. which is fair. I think I now understand this experiment a lot more, why it exists and why he had us do it..

I used pom pom balls as clouds, it was probably the obvious choice, but it gave the piece a kind of fantasy look and couldn't help but put the same effect in the next one. I've never really been into much fantasy, not making it myself at least, unless its scifi. But I started in a place that was different, and I put one thing in place, and then responded to that with something else and I created a world with a stylistic look that I never would have created without starting in that random place.

The best thing about this thought experiment has been discovering these old experiments and revisiting them under new context with a more mature mind. I think maybe I should revisit them with a more childish mind next time..