The Creative Uprising

Propaganda!

The war on creativity is real!

Funding for creative education has been sliced in half by the villainous MoJo BoJo!

Creative thinking is what makes us human.

Don't hide in the barracks of your mind!

Avoid those pesky S.T.M attacks and JOIN THE FIGHT!

I drew these little ideas up of what people from a creative uprising might look like, then I realised that I had to make a film showcasing the creative uprising using the 'script' I'd written.

I convinced my mate Tom to come down, and in-between that and the day I'd decided that we were gonna be the creative uprising, and my four year old daughter was going to join us.

And with two days to go until my 'poster' presentation, and about 4 days until the essay deadline , which I'd written now about three paragraphs for, Tom came round and we got to play in the shed (The Sculpt Factory) for the whole day, building boxes for the fort, launching paint around, drawing on t shirts we couldn't afford to draw on, making paint bombs we realised we could only throw at the shed due to the rented property I'm living in, and generally just having a lot of fun, as if our parents had left us home alone on a sleep over..

My daughter finished school and she came down to finish her t shirt and we had to move quickly to beat the light.

The rebellion at Creative Uprising HQ

We rushed through the filming, and pretty much took the first take of everything, not being too bothered about the end result, there's something great about the looseness and rough, smashed together feel of the video.

The idea of the video was to take the creative Uprising from point A to point B, whilst one character recites the script. Point B is the poster fort, which due to time constraints we decided to use my daughters play house that we balanced cardboard boxes on the outside of, and placed the final 'poster' on the side of..

Watch the video here..

The video ended up being 1 minute and 30 seconds, which I edited in about ten minutes, and honestly, I think it's my favourite piece of filmmaking I've done. Obviously not in skill or aesthetic, it was thrown together in a day without much of a plan, a script that was just the monologue, shot in my back garden with my mate and my daughter. But it's a film I have gone back to watch over and over, there's something incredibly innocent about it, and playful, and I don't think that's just because of my daughter and her reactions to things she didn't know would happen (like launching Tom down the garden) but when watching it I think its very clear how much real fun me and Tom are having ourselves, and there's something beautiful in watching grown men playing flat out and having genuine fun, it's almost a shame I had lines to remember which took me out of the fun of playing.

But with all that being said, the 'script' I'd written was the most natural thing that's ever come out of me, I didn't have to think about it, it was just exactly all the feelings I had on the general subject of creative play at the time, and it's fun, a bit silly, and hopefully funny to some, but this project was created from a deep place of frustration about school education, the lack of creativity in children's toys, the lack of playfulness in adult life, and is the result of two adult men slacking off their adult responsibilities and consciously deciding instead to genuinely play in a shed for a whole day, reflecting exactly what I was trying to get across in the video itself, these creative places that become sanctuaries for people to let go, play and be creative, become incredibly important.

The Creative Uprising is real, join today #Artisnotwork