3 essential parts of the creative process

This week’s newsletter is about the creative process — a simple lens to hopefully offer clarity to anything you produce.

Here are the three things that creative professionals do within every project, regardless of the project’s size or complexity level:

Capture, Create, and Express.

These three steps can vary in order (and will likely become cyclical depending on the production) but are all necessary parts to producing a creative piece in either photography or video. I am inclined to assume that these elements apply to all mediums of creative expression, but I am going to stick to the two disciplines I have personally been paid to engage in.

The Capture stage isn’t always a prerequisite for the next two, but it often comes first. This is straightforward and more obvious when needed to film or photograph subjects (whether they’re the clients, paid models/actors, a place, piece of nature, or an object) as part of your work, but it also happens, at least subconsciously, with the art and information we consume throughout our lives. A wedding or documentary filmmaker, for example, is expected to document specific moments with their camera — this documentation is their Capture, but equally important are the videos they’ve previously seen that will influence how they’ll go about recording and editing.

The Create stage is about that which one brings into existence and shows to an audience. I’ve often heard that one’s best work comes when it’s made for oneself — I agree with this, and if it’s easier to contextualize, you can even think of oneself as the audience for now. If a technique or style is borrowed from a previous artist, a creative professional still achieves his or her own creation by applying their unique thumbprint. Techniques especially are more accurately thought of as “tools.” "The vertigo effect” (also known as “the Hitchcock zoom”) is a great example of a film technique that is still used today in all genres, from thrillers to luxury wedding films. Alfred Hitchcock first used this technique for his unique storytelling goals, but "the vertigo effect" is also used by others to help them achieve their own (as it was by Spielberg in Jaws during one of the beach scenes).

Expression is the more complicated piece of this formula, but it’s worth trying to understand. Creative work is subjective and will always be presented and interpreted differently by each person, but for the creative professionals who say they never wish to “tell” the audience anything but rather elicit meaningful questions and conversations — that type of expression is just as prominent as any other. It's important to recognize expression as an integral, nonnegotiable component of any creative production. When a filmmaker or photographer considers what they’re trying to express, or what might be expressed through their work with or without their intention, the whole process can become clearer.

None of this should be thought of as a rigid framework or cookie-cutter equation. It’s also not any sort of graded scale. Passion and authenticity outweigh any technical or theoretical process, but the goal with identifying and better understanding these three components is to help us be even more passionate and authentic in our production.

If you don’t consider yourself a “creative professional” but you’d like to create something, perhaps ask yourself these 3-4 questions: what have I captured that is inspiring me to create? How will I produce the final product and what am I creating exactly? What am I trying to express by creating this?

I hope you enjoyed this one. Until next week!