Simple traps to avoid.
So, it’s been years since I started doing Video Editing and design stuff. But there wasn’t any bold direction I took my steps towards it. I was procastinating in a bad way (I just found out found out there is good procastination too, more about it later).
I thought I was learning new things, but I wasn’t.
Seeing how things worked!
This is bad!
During the initial days I wasted more of my time watching people do things. Yes, Initially you might try to replicate someone’s works/workflow, Of course because aren’t familiar with the terms in this new field you have entered. Unfortunately it has some side effects. Once You are busy watching others, You might get carried away. You will forget to think on your own. Your creative activities from the brain would be at rest. How do we tackle this ?
Step 1 — Learn the fundamentals
What do I mean ? This is a general approach right? Well, on this growing digital era, there are tons and tons of content being created on Social Media. You connect to the internet and you are choked with content. There Already are so many people on the same path you are trying to get into. They might be working on a different level. Since you being a beginner you will be looking at almost perfect or cool works produced by the people ahead of you and when you take one step ahead and do the research and figure out how they produced it, the steps might seem simple and most of the time you are able to replicate the steps and produce a similar or better content by tweaking various things around. Once people see this works they compliment you and you believe you are good in this field, Sadly this is a trap and you should avoid it. Thus make sure you are aware of the working of every basic elements of the field and be 100% sure about the fundamentals.
The more damaging part was the that I thought I knew everything about it just because I saw how it worked. Well the Fact of the matter is Thinking is easy but doing it is difficult. You can build a castle in your head but in reality those castle will be affected with a lot of factors or in other words you don’t need bricks, stones etc. to build a castle in your head but do you need them for building a castle in reality.
Step 2 — Applying what is learned
You should be as wrong as you possibly can be.
As now you are aware of the basic fundamentals, Start working with it.
If you learnt a tool on your software, bring it to use on your own terms. Do not tend to look on the internet or any examples. Just start using the tool in it’s intended purpose.
You may think the work produced by step two is wrong/not okay/unworthy etc. It is completely fine. It is how it is supposed to be.
Step 3 — Start Creating
Assuming you have already committed more mistakes with the tool you certainly would have also learned the working of the tool. The more mistakes you committed the more you knew how not to do it. This also helped you understand the working of your tool better by know which method to apply to use the tool to yield a better result.
This step also does not guarantee that your work will be 100% Right. You still got to learn and keep learning.
Copying and pretending it was Inspiration.
This trap is pretty dangerous. This trap is tough to recognize making it dangerous (as you are not aware of the problem you would care).
So how to get inspired and not copy?
Method 1
Find out what inspired the maker of the product and follow that lead. So if a song inspires you, don’t follow the artist, follow the thoughts which the artist followed. Maybe he was inspired by someone. Find out that person and look into their works for clues. Find out what lead to this outcome. This will be better for you to make decision in future with confidence.
Method 2
This is partially dependent on the Method 1. Here is what you have to do. Combine all the thoughts in your head and work with it. The thought’s should not be a replica of a work but it must be with the understanding of any work which you choose to be inspired from.
Quote #1
Creativity is all about mistakes, make plenty of them and repeat the process with a new intention!
Quote #2
“Creativity leads to Thinking,
Thinking provides Knowledge and
Knowledge makes you Great” -A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Thank You!
