Document & Show Your Creative Process
You’re a creative person.
And you’re working on stuff that you’re crazy about. You say you’d do it even if you didn’t get paid.
But here’s something that happens with creatives like you.
You tend to stay in your creative closet.
It’s a kind of block that’ll keep you from revealing your true talent. But, with just a little, regular exposure, your creativity can come out of the cage you keep it in.
In the music making world this is called ‘woodshedding.’ As in ‘0ut back practicing in the woodshed for hours and hours to get good enough to play for others.’
But you can build your audience, and be engaging, while you’re still in the woodshed.
You can show your process – a little at a time – no matter what you do and no matter where you are in your learning curve. Each day you can post a small tidbit of what you’re working on.
And you’ll learn so much in the process.
It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Your share can be a tweet, a Facebook post, a photo on Instagram. But most engaging is a short form video.
What I like to call a Mic Drop Moment.
Just pull your smart phone out of your pocket and show us something you’re doing today. Take 30 seconds and then share the clip.
Do it often. Make it a habit. People will respond and you’ll build your community. And once it becomes a habit, it will become part of your creative process – driving your work forward.
How you can do this yourself?
The video above is about as good as a sharing your process video can get. It shows just how engaging a story about someone’s process can be. It’s an endearing interview with artist Zina Nicole Lahr and a close look at her process – something she calls, ‘creative compulsive disorder.’
Zina needed something that would showcase her work but also tell a little bit about her personality and her interests. She had two days to shoot and edit so she and videographer Stormy Pyeatte shot the interview and smashed something together to meet their deadline.
But at nearly 6 and 1/2 minutes this video is long. And it shows so many projects. You could easily break this down to eight or nine separate short clips. There’s the LED parasol project, the robot project(s), the tarantula project, the crane puppet, the train puppet, stop animation, the soldering iron, the sea monster… each one of these could be stand-alone 30-seconds-in-a-day-in-the-life-of-the-artist videos.
How do you do this? You keep your smart phone handy with a simple tripod and turn it on when you hit an interesting or inspiring moment in your day.
You can also get help. Zina enlisted her friend who was a videographer. You don’t even need to go that far. Any friend who knows you well could sit behind your smart phone and make sure that you’re in the frame and ask you questions, interview style.
All you have to do is answer. No script needed. Best situation would be to partner with someone and help each other out with making short ‘share your process’ videos with each other. Not only will this make it easier, and better quality, but you can hold each other accountable.
Zina’s video ended up with a lot of visibility. It was chosen as a staff pick on Vimeo and has over 1 million views on facebook. Gives you some idea of the potential response to a ‘here’s what I’m up to’ video.
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