🐛 TREE 253: Faith in the process

One.

Someone has been skipping leg day.

Two.

At work last Wednesday I received a voiceover script from a client. It was a for a two-minute film promoting a web platform we are building for them. My job was to imagine and create the visuals and make a storyboard for our animator.

I worked on it for an hour on Wednesday. First, I read the script.
Then I complained to myself that it was a rubbish script.
I said it had no story.
I said it was just a list of features.
Then I tried rearranging it.
Then it was 5:30.

I worked on it for half a day on Thursday.
By the time I was done, I had
created three characters,
imagined about 10 seconds of the film,
watched a bunch of other people’s films,
realised that my script rearranging was a bad idea.
I still had no sense of a story.

On Friday morning the logic of the script and 95% of the film came together in my mind within 15 minutes of starting. I spent the day happily making the storyboard.

Younger me would have been panicking on Thursday. I would have been convinced that creativity had abandoned me, that I had lost the spark. I may have worked through the evening desperate to get an idea. (It still wouldn’t have shown up until Friday.)

Old me has learned to have faith the process.

• Have a wide range of good inputs

• Show up and work

• Take breaks

• Repeat

The ideas always come.

Three.

True Faith is one of New Order’s most famous songs, so I have, of course, chosen Jetstream featuring Ana Matronic.

This process seems to be fairly universal when it comes to creative work. If you’d like to read a slightly longer version, you can grab this for two quid.

Grow slowly
Jeff