I’ve been freelancing for 9-months now, as far as jobs go this has almost been the longest one I’ve been able to hold (probably helped by the fact I’m not answering to anyone else). It’s also by far been the most fun I’ve ever had working.
For years I’ve wanted to pursue that creative freedom, I found B2B marketing, as good as it was for learning and getting corporate insights, was never where I wanted to be. Instead I wanted to be on my feet, being social, travelling around and having control over who I work with and what I do for them. This job has given me that.
But it hasn’t been without difficulty. First of all, this job is all-consuming with regards to my life. My performance with this job relies on my health, fitness and lifestyle being in top shape so I can stay alert and keep on the ball. The responsibility is huge, sometimes giving a great sense of freedom, other times bringing a giant sense of nerves.
However, one thing recently has caused more trouble than ever, and is something I am very keen to address given it’s importance to how I move forward with this job: balancing creativity as a job, against creativity as a hobby.
I took this job for my passion of storytelling, editing and filmmaking in general. It was predicated on the fact that I’ve been told I’m good at it. My editing style, narrative structuring and stylistic choices have been praised from various people from various different backgrounds. Needless to say, I came in confident that I could do a good job.
I had been warned about this prior to starting this job, but when your hobby becomes your job, it becomes a lot harder to find time for your hobby. In that, I mean creating now feels much more like work than it does personal expression and liberty.
It’s easy to look at this and think this isn’t really an issue at all, especially in the grand scale. People go to work all the time doing something they don’t enjoy, I’m sure they would long for an issue like this. In response, I will say “Work is still work,” and while I have all these idea I know would be fun to execute in my free time, would sharpen my skills and generally make me a happier creative, it’s hard to overcome this mental barrier that demands I have to meet an expectation that potential clients would find engaging.
Creating For the Sake of Creation
Last year, I made a series of short films for my YouTube channel. The ideas came about in a way that is often familiar to me, I listen to music, that music creates a kind of narrative in my head, and I go about creating that narrative.
The films I made were an experiment with Photoshop’s new “Generative Fill” feature (Then a feature in the beta stages), a 2-minute documentary exploring the history and nature of dancing, and a short animation of a saxophone player against a tropical backdrop, playing to Spyro Gyra’s “Morning Dance.”
These were ideas that just excited me, I was in between jobs, looking for ways to just fill the time between applications. They were there for fun, I had no desire to make them polished and professional really, I was using copyrighted music and turning ideas in my head into life. I was more than happy with the final products.
Better still, people came back to me and said they enjoyed it. They liked the craziness and sharp editing of my AI video, they liked the chaotic narrative of my dance video, and they enjoyed the vibe of my animation.
I actually picked up a client earlier this year because of that dance video, who came to me and said they wanted that style for their own promotion. They were great successes. But then taking that style and making something professional, the stress began.
Truth be told, the idea and execution felt very natural to me, I was exploring a hobby and making the process fun for me. I was aware of an audience that would be watching, otherwise it wouldn’t have been on YouTube, but I didn’t care for sharp, polished and professional.
Much of my work has been an imitation of another filmmaker and editor, Oscar Boyson and Nate DeYoung, who make incredibly engaging and fast-paced edits that swiftly tell a story in a unique and creative way. I like their execution of motion-graphics and visual story-telling, and incorporate much of their design into my work.
When I was suddenly making this work for a client, the standard I had to work to raised significantly, which meant I had to look at my process and explore how I came to make those things.
This, I have found, was incredibly important to me, as much as I can understand my own process, breaking it down and exploring it to a very minute scale meant I got to understand where my ideas come from and how I can look to explore them in the future.
Truth be told, however, it seems to have caused a sort-of hiccup in my creative process now.
I have a whole load of ideas, and I have great desire to see them executed. Last summer’s film-projects showed me that polished and professional isn’t always the way to approach a creative pursuit, and in-fact it can draw you into that paralysed-perfectionism trap.
I very much value the idea of getting pen-to-paper now, because it’s a much easier way of solving a task than overthinking it and not getting anything to show because you expect too much of yourself, but you have to embrace the fact that people aren’t going to be happy with what you initially show.
Yes, it makes the process better in the long-run, but I’m supposed to be a professional, and I have to know that there is an expectation of me still to showcase a level of polish in my work that reflects that. If I show a half-executed idea, it’ll likely be thrown back and my reputation suffers.
I may be labouring the point now, but while it’s excellent having this mentality to create content to a certain standard to reflect my own professionalism as a creative and ability to keep attentive to detail, I need to know how to compartmentalise that side of my creativity that should exist outside of professionalism.
Surround the Good Stuff with Crap.
I would like to create freely, with no inhibition. Make crap for crap’s sake, and free myself from the professional that is much more critical. How do I do that? I can’t think of a clear answer outside of just build a habit out of it.
I’m sure this is an issue faced by many professional creatives, and if the issue was presented to me by someone else, I would point them in the way of the great Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan is a Nobel prize winner for his poetry, he has made songs that have been a phenomenal success and is something of a cultural icon. He also made a lot of shit during his career. I would encourage the reader to put Bob Dylan’s entire songbook on shuffle and listen to the absolute drivel he came out with.
It’s hilarious to know how venerated he is now for his lyricism, but it’s also incredibly refreshing to hear. It wasn’t a case of always looking for that hit that would bring him out and find him success, it was creating and publishing things for a love of the art.
Maybe Dylan reaped the benefits of a different time, however. It’s not hard to believe you’re facing a big audience now, the internet exists and it is armed with social media, where a published item has the potential to meet a crowd of billions.
As a result, it’s not hard to see what succeeds and what fails. Things that fail, in some cases, fail HARD.
Let’s go back a few weeks to the now hugely viral Olympic breakdancing competition. I’m sure it doesn’t take long for you to remember the Australian female competitor, whose performance, for many, brought into question the legitimacy of a supposedly pretty illegitimate sport.
She received hate from every corner of the globe, journalists ridiculed her, social media employed gorilla tactics to make a mockery of her. Plenty came to her defence, and let’s be honest the extent of negative feedback she received was RIDICULOUS, but it makes immediately apparent that if you fail, you can fail HARD.
Audiences are more widely available and that’s fantastic, but on the flip-side of the coin criticism is much easier to come by. Therein may be the reason creating and publishing nowadays can be something of a scarier thing.
Don’t Think Just Do
I wouldn’t call myself risk-averse at all, but I harbour a level of caution in my life which can make me hesitant to do certain things. Having fear is only natural. Sometimes my approach to those kinds of things is to believe the less I think about it, the easier it is to do.
I’ve employed this in many situations in my life, both as a professional and in my personal life. There’s something freeing in only deciding to contemplate one truth: There’s only one way to find out if this is a good or bad idea.
To round back to the issue I started with, I would like to take this approach a lot more with creativity, but that’s much easier said than done.
Ideas can come in a flash, but execution of ideas is generally a much more laborious task. As much as I would love it to be freeing and personal, I still have to run through the same procedures I would as a professional when creating something: create / find the footage, organise it in a way that is easy for me to find, run it through the appropriate systems and check it as I go.
Unfortunately, that is inescapable, and makes creating a much more considered task. Great for professional work, not so good when you just want to make personal crap that you’re trying not to care so much about beyond it being fun.
The issue then, is to find the right way to compartmentalise this process. I suppose building a structure, but separating it from the professional structure. A way of keeping it familiar, but feeling more like a comfort than a chore.
I’ll conclude, somewhat abruptly, here for fear of rambling on too much. This blog has been written without any consideration at all, instead as a response to a lack of activity on this website, and trying to understand how I feel about this issue.
It also serves as a great public record for me to address this issue, and hopefully (if I’m good to myself) explore it further.
Whether this is coherent to the reader, I suppose who cares? I’m more than anything making this for myself, and retaking control of my own creative pursuits.
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