What Drives Creativity?

Creativity.

What is it good for?

Working as a Creative Producer in a creative industry my feeling is that Creativity is such an overused term that it’s become meaningless.

Creativity conjures up images of people sitting around their offices brainstorming and pulling all- nighters, throwing crumpled up ideas into the overflowing wastepaper basket, until they hit the motherlode just hours before the presentation deadline.

But that’s just the movies.

Do creatives have a monopoly on creativity? What if being creative simply means that you make things.

As I write this I’m listening to the soundtrack from Baby Driver.

I went to film school with Edgar Wright and I follow his meteoric rise to stardom with great admiration (and envy) via social media. Baby Driver has just been nominated for 3 Academy awards:

Good for Edgar and his team. I sent him my congratulations.

This follows a few hours later on my facebook feed.

What if that’s the very definition of creativity?

An idea turned into reality.

A thought, a can-do attitude that brings something into being by envisioning it, saying it out loud then making it happen.

Strip away all the woo-woo about creativity and consider for a moment that every time we do or say something we’re creating, we’re breathing life into something.

So how much do corporate clients care about creativity?

In my experience clients don’t want their films to be creative for the sake of creativity. They want their films to deliver a message and effect an outcome in their viewers. Businesses want results, measurable on the bottom line. They want a return on investment. They don’t want to fund the Director’s next showreel film, they want their message delivered in the most elegant way possible so it lands with their target audience and effects their behaviour in a particular way. Click on the link, sign up for the course, or buy the product.

What customers want is Applied Creativity.

Creativity is a sensibility about what works in any given medium. It’s a set of skills – some innate, and some learned - that are surrounded in mystery and swathed in the emperor’s new clothes.

Creativity is just one of many tools we bring to bear on the task of delivering our clients’ messages elegantly, using the full palette of our listening, branding and filmmaking craft skills.

Now that’s what I call Applied Creativity.