How to Be More Creative

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work.” - Albert Einstein.

Often what comes to mind when we think of creativity is making beautiful art, writing a compelling and moving story, coming out with a hit single, etc. However, natural talent is not the major component of creativity, it’s hard work and determination. 

There are many ways to help spark creativity, you just have to show time commitment, effort, and a willingness to learn. 

1. Ask Questions

What is the best way to come up with the perfect question? Write multiple variations of the same question (around 10 variations is a good start). Often, you’ll find that you come up with a better question than the original question you started with. 

2. Become an expert 

If you’ve ever tried to learn something new, you’ve likely heard at least one of the two phrases “practice, practice practice!” or “practice makes perfect.” Research suggests that to be an expert at anything, 10,000 hours of practice is required. However, the well-known musician Yo-Yo Ma seems to believe this isn’t enough practice time. He practices 3 to 6 hours a day and estimates that after practicing 10,000 hours every five years, he has spent at least 50,000 hours playing only his signature work, the Bach Cello Suites. Whether you choose to practice 10,000 hours - more or less - the most important thing is that you’re practicing. 

3. Be open-minded

People who are known to be creative, always look for solutions to problems. Creative people act in unexpected situations because they are curious and want to learn more. By being curious and open-minded, you may find that new opportunities come along. Having a positive attitude and being willing to participate in various projects may lead you to new projects or style choices that you may not have considered but discover you enjoy.  

4. Build a creative network

Creativity and inspiration can come from many different places. It is important to have a network of people that you can work with so you can better explore your ideas. This exchange of information and ideas will encourage you to take risks and try new things. Everyone has a different perspective; take advantage of this. If you want to work with an award-winning audio/video production company that can take your creative vision further faster, feel free to reach out here, and we would be happy to help!

5. When it comes to creativity, do not conform

Growing up, we are primarily taught to conform to the general rules.  While this is important in general, it is very important to make sure this doesn't stop you from branching out and exploring your individuality. Have balance. No two people are the same; your creativity should also be your own. Anthony Burill, author of “Make It Now!” says “as soon as you start doing as you are told and following the rules you stop being truly creative.” 

6. Generate lots of ideas and choose the best ones

Know what you’re looking for. Trust in your intuition and go with ideas that are simple. One thing you can try is to make your ideas compete against one another. Choose two ideas and identify how they are different. If you have several ideas (around 50+), a good idea is to write them on sticky notes and move the ones that are similar, close together. 

You may be struggling with deciphering if an idea is good or not. A good way to know if it is good or not is to take your idea and write pros and cons. Assign each one a number between one and ten to define the amount of importance. The pros should outweigh the cons. If this is the case, chances are your idea is good and strong. 

Set a time to do some free writing. Find a time when your brain is the sharpest, relaxed, and free from distractions. The author of the popular self-help book “The Artist’s Way”, Julie Cameron, recommends that we take half an hour each day to free write in a journal. As this process continues, new ideas will evolve.  

Need an idea for something to write about? Journals with writing prompts may be something you should invest in. You can get these at your local bookstore and they are generally located near the stationary section. Don’t have the money? No worries. Create a list of prompts to help start your writing process.  Here are some writing prompts I sometimes use. 

• Today, I’m grateful for…

• Your favorite vacation

• A favorite gift you have received

• The best thing you have gifted

• What’s the last thing that made you smile?

• What is/was your biggest accomplishment in life?

• What is your biggest fear?

• It’s your last day to live. Without a budget, what would you do? What would you eat?

7. Be resourceful! Come up with many different ideas and combine them 

Try combining things that don’t normally go together. British neuroscientist, Paul Howard-Jones, asked people to create stories. Some people were given three words that relate well to each other, while some were given three non-related words. Results found that the people who were given non-related words created stories that were more creative.  For example, the three words could be mystery, delivery, stalker.

Another fun idea is to make remote associations. Turn to a random page of a book you own (for example, page 56) and find the fifth line. Then, find another book and do the same. Now, write a story that is based on the relation between the two sentences. How are these two sentences connected? By using your imagination and ideas in this way, you can often form new, unique ideas. 

One of our greatest resources is other people.  We typically hang out with people who are similar to us as it brings us comfort.  However, it is important to engage with people who are different from you to help you learn to expand your outlook on life. These different perceptions, outlooks, and experiences can help you become a better-rounded person and help your creativity. 

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Breaks

While hard work is a very important factor in being creative, it is also important to take breaks to give your brain some time to rejuvenate. Oftentimes, the best ideas will come at the most random times when you aren’t trying to put your brain to work. This might happen when you’re in the shower, in the car, trying to fall asleep, etc. Have you ever had a dream but forgot what it was about shortly after waking up? What about having your answers to a problem solved for you while you are sleeping? sleep? Breaks allow you to come up with ideas without getting brain block and not being able to keep your thoughts organized. A journal may be useful so that you don’t forget important ideas or thoughts.

HubSpot's CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan, advocates for naps at the workplace. He finds his best ideas come to him when he is just about to fall asleep or when waking up. In a New York Times interview, he says he wants to make the workplace an environment where employees can “work less and think more”. Now I bet you’re thinking, “I’d love a boss like him!” Make sure that you allow yourself some time to recoup from all the work you’ve done during the day so you aren’t overloaded. 

Conclusion

Everyone goes about being creative differently. Everyone finds inspiration differently.  By familiarizing yourself with the different ways to be creative, I’m sure you’ll find your creativity expands in no time. Where these tips helpful for you? Which techniques are you using? We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments below. Thanks for reading and don’t be afraid to let your creativity shine! 

Written by Amy Anstett

If you’re wanting to learn more about creativity, music production, and business, we are developing a course called Producer Launch that will take you from beginner, all the way to knowing how to become a successful producer for a living!

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Sound Design: 6 Essential Tips for Cinematic Sounding Films

Sound design is an essential part of the filmmaking process. It can be a time consuming process and most of the professional films you see today have outsourced studios dedicated to just this element of filmmaking do the work. Not everyone’s budgets can account for this so here are the 6 essential things you need to know for cinematic sound design. 

Using Sound Effects

Sound effects are a critical component to creating cinematic sounding films. What sound effects do for our films is add realism to our visual content and set the mood for each moment within our story. There are a plethora of techniques for using sound effects but a couple of the most important are layering and using ambience.

Layering sound effects together is an easy way to make your films sound unique and original.  You can use layering to add more depth to your sound like adding transient sounds to match a visual such as footsteps. 

Using ambience sounds can make a sequence of shots feel more coherent with each other. If you are filming deep and close in a city filled with traffic, capturing what your characters hear immerses your audience within the scene. Using the sounds of gridlock traffic up close is a good starting point into doing that. 

Adding Background Music

Use background music to elevate the story you are trying to tell. Background music is used to evoke emotion especially in the absence of dialogue. It sets the mood of a scene and can be used to represent a character’s feelings and emotions. Background music is also a great tool to alert the audience of things unseen or unknown by your characters in the story. 

A good rule of thumb when sound designing is to score first. Setting up a foundation with the overall framework or rhythm of your sequences with music or other sound effects used for scoring purposes can allow for all the other elements of sound design to fall into place naturally. It ensures that every beat and impact hits where intended! 

If you have a scene with no background music, you can still score the scene with clever sound effects. Using repetition of sound effects can give the illusion of a score and keep a consistent theme within your piece. 

DIY and Foley

When you don’t have or can’t find the right sound to portray the certain emotion you want to portray, record Foley yourself during post-production or create sounds using custom plug-ins offered in your video editor or a DAW. Foley itself is a great way to add realism to the sound of your film.

You don’t have to be an expert to add custom foley into your projects. Try recording everyday sounds or sounds that peak your interest and enhance your work with truly one of a kind sound effects. 

Another way to DIY your sound design is to use effects and plug-ins to modify existing sounds. Pitch shifting a sound for example can be an effective way to change the mood of a sound. Generally, pitching sounds up will make them sound more serene, while pitching sounds down can make them sound more intense and terrifying. 

Dialogue

Dialogue is the main motivating factor that keeps audiences captivated in your films so it should be your top priority when sound designing. 

Keep your dialogue as clear as possible. Be mindful of background noise when recording dialogue and choose to record lines of dialogue in isolation from each other. It’s best to use post-production to your advantage in this case to stitch together pieces of dialogue with fades. This way, you have full control over every line spoken and can make the dialogue flow seamlessly.  

Another tip when working with spoken dialogue is to use an equalization plug-in to enhance the vocal frequencies. Many plug-ins tend to have presets built specifically for this!

Effects and Plug-ins

Modifying sounds with effects and plug-ins are an important part of sound design ‒ even if the intended outcome is subtle. Using techniques such as increasing the intensity of a sound, panning a sound from ear to ear, or adding reverb to a sound can enhance the sound of a film tremendously. All of these can be done by using effects and plug-ins!

A riser is a specific type of sound effect that builds intensity with sound. You can create a riser with a consistent tone just by starting with the volume low and then raising the volume exponentially. Doing this when leading up to a climactic moment in your film can be an easy way to fully immerse your audience and raise their heart rate.

Panning sounds such as foley or dialogue can be a good way to add depth to your films. Let's say a car is to drive past the frame from right to left. Using foley sounds of the car driving past adds to the realism of the sequence but if you also pan the shot accordingly to move the sound in 2D space from ear-to-ear, you can effectively increase the realism of the sound even more with minimal effort. 

Adding reverb to sound effects can alter the scale of the sound at a dramatic scale. Reverb increase the scale and distance of a sound. Use it wisely to add weight to your sound.

Focus on Telling a Story

Sound design as a whole is a tool filmmakers use to tell their story. It’s one thing to add matching sound effects to a sequence to simply add realism to your work, but it’s another thing to add sounds that portray the mood of the film purposefully throughout a sequence. So at the grand scale, always have sound design in mind before starting production. 

Try to look for the right sound effects, music, and foley that match the mood you are trying to portray. The feeling of your scene is what matters the most when it comes to cinema! An example of this is using powerful hits of sound (also known as an impact sound) to punctuate an impactful moment within your story.  

Conclusion

And those are 6 of the most important tips to keep in mind when sound designing cinematic films. Use sound effects, background music and ambience to marry your visuals with sounds that fit the mood you are going for. When in a bind, look to creating sounds yourself and using effects to enhance existing sounds. And lastly, always keep your dialogue clear and always prioritize what story you are trying to tell when choosing the perfect sounds for your film.

Written by Zeeshan Khamis

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How to Create a Video Storyboard

Sometimes, the process of producing a video can be intimidating. If you’ve clicked on this link, you’re probably a video creator of some sort whether it be live-action, animation, stop motion etc. and you want to elevate your video content. Well, you’ve come to the right place because I can guarantee you that creating a storyboard for your video is a key step in your overall process to producing your video with the highest quality. 

What is a Storyboard?

Now you may have created video content but have never heard of a storyboard. Storyboarding dates back all the way to the 1930s when Walt Disney developed the idea and was first created for the Disney short “The Three Little Pigs”. Storyboarding is a visual representation of how the story of your video will unfold, shot by shot. It is made up of ordered pictures or illustrations/drawings of what the shot is going to be. Underneath the visual representation, there is usually a description of the action, the type of shot and angle it is, and any dialogue from the script that is going to accompany the shot. 

The Different Kinds of Storyboards

Like most things in life, there are different approaches and kinds of storyboards that have been discovered and developed over the years. There are 3 different kinds, those being:

• Traditional storyboards

• Thumbnail storyboards

• Animated storyboards

Traditional Storyboards 

Traditional storyboards are various pencil or ink drawings that assist in visualising the story of a video before beginning to fim. They can be displayed sequentially in a sketchbook or hung up on a wall. This method allows you to be as detailed or simple as you want. 

Several traditional storyboards also have written notes under the drawings to describe what is happening in the scene. These notes can be in point form and brief. 

Thumbnail Storyboards 

The second type of storyboard is thumbnail storyboards. Like a thumbnail for a YouTube video, a thumbnail storyboard shows a representation of what the premise is. Thumbnail storyboards call for tiny sketches - the size of a postage stamp - that shows your shots in your video on pieces of paper. 

However, due to the miniscule size of these sketches, it leaves little room for detail. This version of storyboarding is beneficial for quickly outlining  your ideas before making a more detailed version of your storyboard using a method such as the traditional storyboard. 

Animated Storyboards

The world of technology is always evolving, making it possible to create things such as live animations helping to create animated storyboards. Animated storyboards have dialogue and music. They are composed of sketches strategically filmed to show timing, pacing and flow of a scene and it is much easier to get your story across. 

Why Should You Storyboard?

Have you ever watched a book-to-movie adaptation and was disappointed because it wasn’t what you pictured? I’m sure there are many cases like this. A storyboard helps you to share your vision with others and really help sell the story whether it is a campaign for a commercial to a big Hollywood film.You can then get feedback from others and make changes. They may help you to fill in gaps that were missing in the story so that everything that happens in your story flows with no loose ends. If just a storyboard can move people and connect the audience to the characters, imagine how the end product will be recieved!  By making a storyboard, it helps your pre-production process and helps you to remember what shots you need. By having the story all laid out before production begins, it saves a lot of time and energy and will make sure you are using your time efficiently. 

Creating a Storyboard

You may be thinking to yourself, “Wow, a new step to the process?” Don’t worry, it’s fairly simple. Storyboarding is fairly similar to a shot list. However, storyboards are laid out in a much more story-like manner.

The process of creating a storyboard can be as simple or elaborate as you want to make it. Before storyboarding was first developed, animator Webb Smith was credited by Disney for the idea of drawing out scenes on separate sheets of paper, pinning them up on a bulletin board to create a sequence of a story, thus creating the first ever storyboard

Storyboards can be very simple and you don’t have to be an artist to create a storyboard. You can make one as simple as drawing stick figures using a professional program. The choice is up to you and your ability level. Choose what suits you. 

There are many different methods of storyboarding. 

You can use:

• Sketches with descriptions

• Google slides

  • Insert pictures into a slide with  bullet-point descriptions 

• Google docs

  • Create a table and insert pictures into the columns

  • Make sure you number the pictures accordingly

  • Underneath the pictures, add descriptions 

• Celtx

• Storyboarder (It’s paid but a great option for artists)

  • Draw in depth illustrations of the shot to clearly visualise the story with 6 different drawing tools

  • Enter dialogue and action underneath the panel. You can also include the timing information and shot type

These are just some of the many options to create a storyboard. 

Not all storyboards have to be created from sketches or drawings. You can also go to your filming locations with your actors and take pictures that will help visually represent the shot and action. In my opinion, taking pictures of the shot is much more efficient as you will have a clear, visual representation of the shot and angle you will need when it comes to production time. Since  it is harder within illustrations to create 3D depth, a photo will help you to understand exactly what your vision is, along with the description that will be provided under each picture in your storyboard. 

Do you know what you want your video to accomplish? What is the purpose for the video and what is the message you want to get across? What feelings are you trying to evoke in the audience? Make sure this is clear and set goals for your video. If you are getting feedback from others that your idea is evoking the emotions you wanted, you know you are on track. 

To create a storyboard, you first want to break down your script into actions as you will need to describe the action of each shot when you storyboard. You want to draw/import images that will move the action along. Too many images can be overwhelming and you will waste time that could be spent on other details. On the other hand, too little images will make your storyboard hard for people to understand. Know the right amount. 

Then, you will want to make multiple blank panels and number them in order.  There are many storyboarding outlines online or you can create your own. 

Next you will want to write up a description that includes the action, the type of shot and angle and dialogue that will accompany the shot. 

You don’t have to stop there! You can make multiple storyboards and revise and edit through the process. 

All storyboards should include:

• The project name 

  • Even if you don’t have one, create a working title and you can rename this later

• The scene number

  • Numbering scenes is important so you don’t get the order of your story mixed up

• Page number

Conclusion

There you have it! This is everything you need to know about storyboarding and how to create your very own video storyboard. You now know what a storyboard is, the different types of storyboards, why you should storyboard and how to create a storyboard. Do you think this will help you to improve your video production? Let us know in the comments below!

Written by Amy Anstett

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