Creative Process Review

The creative process was incredibly enjoyable to me. This is probably due in large part to the fantastical and fictional elements in the material i chose to create. I took great pleasure in pushing my writing ability. I was in a lot of ways taking steps out of my comfort zone. In a sense the writing style I have been cultivating of late has been highly critical and satirical due to the fact I’ve been writing largely for my stand up and a black comedy radio play. This project however is the polar opposite of such an approach. I forced myself to write in a more upbeat optimistic and positive voice which at times I found awkward. This caused me to try and redevelop my vocabulary and find and use words that i generally wouldn’t use to help contribute to this awkward style. And to do so they seemed like natural choices when in the truth is without my handy thesaurus I would in actual fact have let the narrative drift astray and into a tone that didn’t suit it.  

I suppose the earliest difficulty I encountered was letting go of my cu chullainn idea, this was not a new idea like my D.A.R.W.I.N. and Beagle game and has long been a pet project of mine morphing from an animated short pitched in 2^nd year of animation to a web comic ditched in 4^th year due to time restrictions to the form of a computer game pitched for the original peer review process. The background of the project was probably quite clear in the story format in submitted as i had decided to focus in on a key scene and elaborate upon, leaving all of the reviews to assume it was a short story and not a computer game I was pitching. A lot of my apprehensions in leaving this project behind comes from the longer time it’s been swirling around in my head and the vested interest that creates, also i had several early blows to my D.A.R.W.I.N. project and at that point hadn’t worked out who the characters were well enough to have formed as strong a connection to them.

The biggest and most disheartening set back in the whole creative came from five words “have you heard of Spore,” this came from a conversation with the group an evening just prior to first peer review. After a quick synopsis from the group I frantically looked it up and there it was, I fantastic entertaining computer game with evolution at its core. I was gutted, in its form at the time my concept was a very distant second place. How I had missed this product dumbfounded me, i felt like a cartographer who was convinced that the world was flat and had just seen Magellan or Columbus sail triumphantly back into port. The proximity of this discovery to the peer review and the early stage of the D.A.R.W.I.N. project probably explain why i had such hesitations leaving Cu chullain behind.

In retrospect though this discovery has been by far the most beneficial thing to happen to my project, it caused me to move away from the technical mind frame I was approaching it from and try and concentrate on who the main characters are. This feeling and awareness of of being outclassed in the original goal of the project was the grain of sand that help form the new pearl, the new more personal connection to my project.  

I’m relatively happy with the way I’ve broken up the workload to my project, however in what is becoming an apparent aspect of my work across the board I found it hard not to move away from visual elements to my work, maybe after all this time handing up story boards and being assessed on visual content it’s hard to leave that frame of mind behind, particularly as that is the medium I feel more comfortable expressing myself in. A lot of time was wasted on unnecessary visual factors; however that is not entirely true seeing D.A.R.W.I.N. and Beagle pictorially in front of me helped me to understand them, get under their skin and see through their eyes.