Response To Creativity Question

Creativity is 'A process needed for problem solving...not a special gift enjoyed by a few but a common ability possessed by most people.' (Jones 1993) To what extent do you agree with this viewpoint?

  

I believe that creativity is a process that is needed for problem solving to some extent, but I believe that problem solving is a more logical process. I also believe that creativity is possessed by everybody, but the quantity of creativity varies in each person, as do many other human characteristics.

What Can Most People Do?

Creativity is defined as: The use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.

In this case, barely anybody in the world is creative - nobody is original anymore as a 'new' product is usually just a recreation of another existing product.. Everything is ripped off one another or is inspired by something else. However, creative could be seen in the light of being inventive in which case many people have access to appropriate software/hardware which allows them to be largely inventive. Being inventive is a common trait possessed in people as with the use of the internet and other archives we are able to research and plan extensively which allows us to see forms and conventions of other existing media products and adapt our inventions around them.

What Is The Process Of Being Creative?

In order to be, what we assume is, creative, we must research and plan thoroughly in order to find out what conventions the media product we are aiming to create uses in order for the product for us to create to fit into this genre of product. Audiences of today will not recognise the type of product we are aiming to create without the use of conventions as it will not be seen as 'normal' to the genre - so the product will not be successful. If a product is truly creative, it will use barely any (if any) of the conventions of another media product - therefore it would not be the type of product you are aiming for and so would create its own genre. So even by being creative in media you have limitations.

After you have looked into this research for the conventions, you must create your product, evaluate it and re-assess or change it as necessary. Being creative in making your media product has many refining processes and analyses in order to make it just as you wish. Arguably, by the time you have finished creating your product, you have analysed it in such depth you are no longer being creative as the elements you have assumed to be 'creative' have been removed to solve problems of not fulfilling conventions. So, looking back over the quote from Jones, I think that creativity is not a process used for problem solving, but instead problem solving destroys creativity in order to fulfill the conventions of today's society's media products.

Creativity In My Products

When creating my prelim magazine, I used conventions which I thought I already knew to create a magazine which was, in my opinion, not a bad first attempt:

However, after looking at conventions, developing the product and using research and planning - my final product actually ended up like this:

As you can see, the magazine is not too different from the prelim as there are only so many conventions in magazine that you can find. The brief of the prelim magazine and the coursework magazine meant that their were time constraints on my creativity, conventions of the music magazine meant I was not able to create something completely new and interesting and the budget of my magazine meant that I had to be quite minimalistic in the props I used and the editing skills I had. The teacher's input to improve my grade was also another factor which meant that my creativity was not as free-flowing as i'd liked it to have been. This, again, shows how creativity is destroyed by problem solving and to fit into conventions.

When we created our remake of Busted's 'That's What I Go To School For', our creativity was very limited as we had to use a direct copy, however, creativity came through in our use of materials we had and the technology we used. But creativity was not really showed in this part of the preliminary task.

When we came to making our final coursework video, we ended up re-filming most parts of the planned scenes such as playing the guitars as it did not fit conventions of the genre, however, when it came to the scenes of disjuncture where the band were playing and having fun, we did not have to re-shoot anything as it fit into the 'disjuncture' area of the genre we were aiming for and so our creativity was able to flow freely and we could make the most of the resources we had.


The Skeleton Boys - One Night In October by Harry_Tibbles


In terms of the digipak and poster, I was able to use my creativity more extensively than in any of my other media products I had created to date. The reason for this was because the spectrum of digipaks is far wider than that of a music video or a magazine and there are far less conventions to abide by and you are able to get away with more artistic and convention-challenging ideas. Our band fitted into the 'Indie' genre and as part of the indie genre, bands tend to use quite simplistic ideas and images which would seem to an outsider like they have effortlessly created an image - but this is not the case. The art form which Vampire Weekend use is very different to many other different artists and so I used my product knowledge to be inventive and create a product which is strongly inspired by this. This time, I did not use creativity for problem solving but instead to make something which was aesthetic. Although you could argue I created this product for problem solving as it is practical as it shows song names on the back cover.

This inventive digipak, however, was not particularly continued through into my poster as I just copied, within reason, all of the elements from my digipak but into a marketable form. This, therefore was to solve the problem of potential customers not recognising the branding of my products.

To conclude, I do not think that creativity is used for problem solving, as that is a more logical process, I do think, however, that creativity is possessed by many people, but, like I said in the introduction, the quantity in each person varies, along with other human characteristics.