01/23/2009 01:39:04 PM
There's a great visual that's circulating around creative and design departments, this very minute, it's a quote from director Jim Jarmusch encouraging people to steal ideas, because there's no such thing as an original idea.

Of course, this is a constant topic of debate especially as every creative idea appears to be under the microscope these days and someone usually digs up a similar idea.

jarmuschquote
The Jarmusch quote came from an interview he did with Moviemaker Magazine back in 2004, the visual is from Rule#5.

Here it is in it's complete form- expletives and all..(apologies!!)

Rule #1
: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary.

Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.

Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.

Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics...).

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”



Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: jarmusch (1) creativity (15)

02/25/2008 05:48:29 PM
Behance is a company that serves the needs of the growing network of independent creative professionals. It does everything from helping them find jobs, foster collaboration, generate new ways to think and delivers an engaging environment to view portfolios and creative samples.

I spent some time with Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, to learn a little more.

1. What inspired you to make the leap from Wall Street to the creative world?


My work on Wall Street involved organizational and leadership development. I specialized in helping new, rapidly growing teams deal with the challenges that come along with growth. At night, I would try to leverage some of these skills for my friends in more creative and entrepreneurial roles. I found that, more than anyone else, creative leaders and teams struggle to push ideas forward. I became very interested in the leadership and organizational struggles of the creative world. I also believe that life is interesting because of the creative achievements around us. The music, art, design, and new businesses that start as ideas and ACTUALLY happen are the source of society's advancement.

2. Briefly describe what Behance is all about?

Behance is relentlessly focused on developing knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen. We believe that creative leaders and team are never short of ideas, but often lack the organizational skills, leadership capability, networks, and platform to push ideas forward.

Our model is very simple: Over the past two years, we have interviewed hundreds of especially productive creative teams. In each interview, we ask "how do you make ideas happen?" We zoom in on methods and tips for productivity, networking, leadership, and strategy.

Behance is NOT about idea generation or stimulating innovation. Rather, we are focused on boosting productivity and access to opportunity in the creative world.

Here are a few examples of how our products and services accomplish our mission:

Behance Network

The Behance Network was developed as a platform for efficient dissemination of creative work. If a member posts a new project that is "appreciated" by the community, then it is likely that tens of thousands of people will see the work. We've had nearly a million visitors in the past month or so, and many of the visitors come from top agencies, galleries, and other companies seeking creative talent. Members use the network as a tool for self-marketing, exchanging feedback with peers, staying accountable to goals, and building professional networks.

Action Method

There is a great, self-proclaimed shortage of productivity in the creative world. We have noticed that "office-centric" or lingo-intensive systems for productivity, including GTD, are not easily adopted among creatives. Rather, we discovered that creatives need a simple, design-centric system method for creative project management. We developed the Action Method in response to the best practices we observed. The Action Method has spawned an entire product line that is sold around the US and the Museum of Modern Art stores, including the critically acclaimed "Action Book."

Behance Magazine


As we conduct interviews, we write up articles and also generate new "tips" for creative professionals. We have gathered them together in an online magazine.

Advisory Services

Our team is starting to do a lot of consulting work for creative teams within large companies. Surprisingly, creative teams suffer from many of the same inefficiencies as a designer or artist. We think that every creative company, agency, and project needs to consider a path to what we call "productive creativity."

3. How do you see the Behance growing and developing in the future?

Our team hopes to continue developing products and services that address the needs of creative professionals. We are starting to develop some interesting web-based applications in response to suggestions we have received. We are also developing a whole pipeline of knowledge, mostly "tips," that will help boost productivity in the creative workspace. The Behance Network is also an ongoing project that we believe is only in the "first inning." Ultimately, we will feel successful if more ideas actually happen as a result of our work.

4. What are some of the biggest trends you see out there in the world of creative professionals?

There are two trends we talk about quite often:

(1) More than ever before, we are seeing "creative" as a trait actively sought by recruiters across industries. We're also seeing the more self-described "creative" folks on teams getting promoted on the basis of their creative contributions. Of course, once creative people are empowered within a company/team, there is a great need for increased leadership capability and productivity.

(2) Creative professionals are feeling more empowered to represent themselves professionally, rather than depend on being found by a headhunter or working full-time for an agency. The "freelancer" is starting to act more like a business than an individual. We see the amount of work and opportunities that Behance Network members are getting.

5. What will it take for America to compete in the battle for creative talent?

It is really interesting to consider America's "competitive advantages" over the past decades. Remember that big American companies like GE and Hewlett Packard used to compete on "efficiency." GE's development of Six Sigma and HP's advances in plant efficiency were big selling points.

However, now GE has changed their tag line to "imagination at work" and HP is all about innovation. The change in brand is evidence of the fact that efficiency is now accomplished through off-shoring and is no longer a competitive advantage.

Our team believes that innovation is the grounds for competition going forward. We also believe that innovation is the result of PRODUCTIVE creativity. As companies hire more creative professionals to fuel innovation, they will recognize the need to design teams and workflow to achieve Productive Creativity.

To stay competitive, we think American business needs to bridge the gap between creative and other departments. There must be an emphasis on the components of "Productive Creativity," and we're hoping that Behance plays a critical role in this trend.

6. Where do you find your inspiration?

Most or our team's inspirations come from our own frustrations as creative professionals. We're in a unique business where the greatest "breakthroughs" are a response to the greatest frustrations we observe in our work and when we consult for others.

Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: behance (1) creativeclass (1) creative (4) creativity (15)

01/09/2008 10:20:17 PM (2)
Nokia and the Future Laboratory, have just completed a research study that explored attitudes and developments in the use of technology and media.

They talked to 9,000 consumers in 17 countries. The breakthough finding and brave prediction is the emergence of what Nokia is calling "Circular Media"

"From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call 'Circular'. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media.

We think it will work something like this; someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file - the soundtrack of the evening - then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."


Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia

It's an interesting theory, the idea that consumers will add and to, interact and participate with media makes complete sense, but the constant addition and participation by members of a friendship group is hard to believe, as is the shelf-life of each piece of content.

This could get easily become boring in a short period of time.

Nokia's report also appears to miss the blending and blurring of user-generated and conventional media; users taking established media content and adding their own spin to that content.

Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: circularmedia (1) media (38) content (6) nokia (16) consumers (3) ugc (1) creativity (15)

12/21/2007 07:18:40 AM
As the advertising industry falls more and more in love with black boxes, terabytes of data and predictive models, it could be missing out on the one thing it needs to encourage, the random.

One of the non-fiction books of the year is Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, which examines the significance of rare and unexpected events and the lack of human understanding about these areas.

As human beings we are always looking to explain things and develop theories to explain the unexplainable.

The more we develop plans and process to create outcomes, its less likely that these will generate something breakthrough.

Taleb believes that tinkering and doing is the way to create and make something interesting, this isn’t about following a predictable and prescribed pathway that’s based on past events.

“Let us go one step further. It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don't know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past--but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.”

Forbes- May 23rd- 2007


While it’s undeniable that tracking and accountability are essential elements of responsibility for the agency: client relationships, there’s significant danger in believing that past results can predict future success.

In the end, it’s all about allowing and encouraging accidents to happen.

Maybe Account Planners should change their title to Accident Makers.

Agencies should look at how they can create environments and situations that allow these accidents to happen.

This could involve a radical look at how creativity is developed and the environment its developed in- our office space, etc.

We need to be more comfortable about embracing chaos.

Most significant of all, is that in a world where breaking through is getting tougher by the minute, agencies must teach their clients how to embrace “the accident”, instead of falling back on tried and tested formulas.

For many, this will involve throwing away the rules, this will be hard to do, but it’s likely that those who don’t embrace and encourage unexpected accidents, won’t achieve the success both they and their brands desire.

Here’s an interview Charlie Rose did with Nicholas Taleb in August of this year.



Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: agencies (4) blackswans (1) tinkering (1) unexpected (1) (2) chaos (1) taleb (1) blackswan (2) creativity (15) accidents (1)

11/16/2007 06:06:50 AM
Here are 15 things that I know, now that I didn’t at 9am yesterday, thanks to Jonah, Scott and Teressa's Ad Age/Creativity Idea conference.

1.    No one has every liked a single one of Russell Simmons' ideas.
2.    David Jones is putting digital at the center of everything Euro RSCG does and think that agencies core skill is short form storytelling, a talent that will always been in demand.
3.    IDEO believe that advertising suffers because it’s become so pervasive (just like pollution) and that tonally, it no longer expresses optimism and instead has a cynical and negative view of the world. However, if you encourage people to participate, they will step forward and positively surprise you.
4.    BBDO engages in Collaborativity and hosts workshops to make this happen with clients, not the agency, coming up with ideas. They’ve already done 20 workshops at GE alone
5.    David Droga wants to help his clients achieve momentum, become the new home shopping king with Honeyshed (40 people in LA and lots of help from Smuggler) and wants to educate New York kids using their cellphones.
6.    Barry Diller may or may not be interested in AOL, believes that mobile is the future and that his recent Ask campaign, “the alogorithm” was a “total bust”.
7.    Blendtec – the YouTube kings, have achieved over 70 million views of their films and are now making money from ad revenue on Revver, developing ads for other clients and of course, the five-fold increase in sales was nice too. Also, every company needs to be using RSS feeds- so your customers can get news about you.
8.    VBS- are the kings of cool. They just are and their global, gonzo news journalism is truly one of a kind as witnessed by their soon to be released documentary- Heavy Metal in Baghdad. They are the MTV for the generation that no longer watches MTV.
9.    The CEO of Seventh Generation sits on the board of Greenpeace and consults with Lee Scott of Wal-Mart and after years of not like the Bentonville giant as now come around. He believes his products aren’t sustainable and are only less good. He believes companies will soon be judged by their ethical performance and businesses will not be allowed to get away with stuff for much longer.
10.    Facebook innovates by empowering its employees to do what the hell they want.
11.    Robert Stephens of the Geek Squad told us the importance of a culture, that his employees connect on X-Box Live and how uses Kung-Fu movies as a recruitment tool
12.    The Most Interesting Man in the World campaign is for Dos Equis and made by Euro RSCG, but only has 60,000 views compared to the Blendtec’s 70 million
13.    “CGM is not an idea” David Jones
14.    Facebook believe that there’s nothing better than a trusted referral and that offering that up to advertisers is huge.
15.    A picture sharing game called ESP is one of the most addictive games ever, but more than that, it can be used to accurately predict cultural trends and has the potential to morph into the world’s biggest dating site.


 

Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: adage (4) ideaconference (1) creativity (15)

08/24/2007 06:20:39 PM
 

Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: crowd (2) etchasketch (1) worldslargest (1) creativity (15)

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