Very nice animation of Ira Glass‘ insightful thoughts on the key to success in creative work:
I couldn’t agree more. Of course it is no new knowledge that practice is essential, but I like Glass‘ observation of this tension between one’s good taste (which I understand as being able to recognize great work and bad) and their work which is not quite there yet.
The video is based on an excerpt of a 4 part series on storytelling, which is available on Open Culture.
Via Brainpickings.
I saw this video of a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business quite a while back. A super interesting talk and a must for everybody managing creative environments. Simon Law’s presentation reminded me a lot of this. Because great is not something that is achieved by one person, but by a team. And the black magic is probably to bring together such a team. In these 55 minutes Catmull tells some very interesting lessons Pixar learned over the years.
Here is what I learned (there is much more in it, these are just my points):
1) Create a team that can be necessarily honest. It must be safe to speak the truth.
As Catmull says, it takes a lot of maturity and professionalism to do this. This is the most important and the hardest thing.
2) Review frequently, best daily. Review when incomplete, in-the-works stuff. Do not wait until done, because when you’re done, you’re done. First, this takes embarassment, because you do it every day. It enables to make things right and better before they are past the line of no return and it makes you more creative.
3) To achieve quality, you have to aim for quality without compromise. It’s never too late for quality or great. If you go for good enough you’ll get less than good enough.
4) Very simple principle: „Once one can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then one can use the statement and not have to have a fear of changing behavior.“
So many mantras do exist but do in no way change the behavior of the companies claiming them. It is true for brands, for advertising agencies, for account planners, for any creative venture. Especially in advertising because we formulate these concise statements all the time (Disruption, Brand Ideals, Truth well told and so forth). Too often they become blinds that hide the question „What do we actually do?“.
There is a very nice illustration making the rounds on the web, which captures the difference between Pixar and, well, everybody else. (Note that there are no images needed to sell the idea, just simple sentences)
On a side note, Catmull’s background was neither business manager nor a creative, but computer science. His approach is more like a programmer searching for a bug. More managers should be like him.
Working in teams with the creatives here at Miami Ad School in Hamburg, I have a strong feeling of deja vu – of me as a young copywriter. The one defining lesson I took from my experience in the creative field was how much you can fall in love with what you believe is a great idea. But, truth be told, it is not a good idea – no matter how eloquently you post-rationalize it. The memory of me as a bad copywriter is my constant reminder how important the third person in the middle is to ask, „Does this really work?“.
A quote from a discussion this week: „I know it goes against all the values of the brand, but I want to present it anyway.“ So what do you think will happen? That miraculously the client throws over board all his prior considerations and picks your idea? That would not a the brave client, that would be a stupid client.
Now there is proof you can make a client brave and bold, but you need substance and strategy that make sense for the client, not for yourself, not for the idea. I am still amazed how many of the seemingly crazy ideas (Old Spice guy) have obvious and clear strategy behind them (we need to address married middle-aged women because they make the bodywash decisions for their husbands, often choosing lady-scented varieties). Planning gruntwork and great creative helped P&G take a controlled risk, not a leap of faith.
Creatives have it tough. Idea after idea after idea rejected, buried, killed. Every meeting a rendezvous with the guillotine for your most brilliant work to date. I get why they hate it. I’d hate it, too. But all the great clients are usually the toughest clients with meetings that can be summarized (according to folks I met) as „Great! Your best work, ever! – Make it better.“ To steal and paraphrase a quote from Winston Churchill: „Great creative is the result of going from one rejected idea to another with no loss of enthusiasm“. Creative is more about letting go many ideas than coming up with one perfect idea.
That said, being aware of the creative’s fragile mind I avoided to kill off the idea of the prior quote: I will let the person present their great idea personally, if they show up on time. Which they never did at any of our meetings. I rest assured we will not be wasting our client’s time in the meeting.
I am not too convinced of crowdsourcing, more precisely, most of the ways I observed crowdsourcing in practice. Most of the times you get the feeling companies use crowds to get cheap ideas and designs. You know what I mean, first three get a small price and the company then picks a random design from the pool of thousands of submissions they got for free and now own.
But Casey Pugh’s StarWarsUncut is a whole new set of awesome and it shows the way to make exciting things happen together with the multitude of creative people on the web. For StarWarsUncut the original Star Wars: A New Hope was split up into 472 parts of 15 seconds each. People could claim segments and submit their interpretation of it. All clips will be stitched together to make up a whole new experience of the classic. As of April 9, the team of StarWarsUncut announced that the movie is finished and posted the first trailer.
Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.
I don’t know about you, but this looks amazing and exciting. So many brilliant ideas in so little time. I wonder what the full movie experience feels like, but I can’t wait to see the whole thing.
There is also a five minute teaser available: Teaser here.
