Creativity

AS Coursework:

• inspiration - my magazine was inspired by many other indie genre music magazines, as I used similar conventions and styles to theirs to convey my own genre.
• inventiveness - I had to invent my own artist to feature in my magazine, creating a back story and products in order to make the magazine more realistic.

A2 Coursework:

• resourcefulness - we used the resources around our location to get the props we needed for our video, meaning we could get everything we needed from one place.
• originality - our idea and artist for our video was original.

What has prevented you from being more creative?

• Task choice being made beforehand: we were given the task to complete and couldn't choose what project we wanted to undertake.
• Project deadline: we had to have certain parts of our project done for certain dates meaning we couldn't go back and improve or change parts we may have wanted to, or spent more time on tasks.
• Difficulty in gaining the preferred location: it was difficult to find the right location we wanted
• Technology used: we didn't have access to professional technologies that are used in the media industry.
• The actors used: we didn't use professional actors/models for our projects, instead using friends who weren't used to being in similar situations.

Ideas & Theories
"A process needed for problem solving...not a special gift enjoyed by a few but a common ability possessed by most people" (Jones 1993) - agree

"The making of the new and the re arranging of the old" (Bentley 1997) - agree

 

"Creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and valid ate the innovation." (Csikszentmihalyi 1996) - disagree

"There is no absolute judgement [on creativity] All judgements arecomparisons of one thing with another." (Donald Larning) - agree

"Technology has taken all the creativity out of media production" - disagree

"A project that is too well planned lacks opportunities for spontaneity and creativity." - disagree

"Media producers can learn nothing from studying the conventions of old texts." - disagree

The creation of bringing something new into existence - "this particular understanding of creativity involves the physical making of something, leading to some form of communication, expression or revelation" (David Gauntlett) - disagree

"If creativity is not inherent in human mental power and is, in fact, social and situational, the technological developments may well be linked to advances in the creativity of individual users." (Banji, Burn and Buckingham 2006) - agree


Outline to what extent you were creative in your AS and A2 coursework tasks?

Within the AS and A2 coursework task there were 5 main problems which hindered how creative I could be overall: the task choice, the deadlines, the technology, the actors and the location. As our tasks were chosen beforehand by the school, it meant that we couldn't be as created as we wanted as we couldn't choose what coursework task we wanted to do being told that we were to make a music magazine for AS coursework and a music video for A2 coursework. Although this was unavoidable, it lowered the level of creativity because it wasn't possible to do anything we wanted, within reason. During the creation of my coursework, deadlines were set to make sure that everything was up to date and that the work was actually being done. However, the deadlines sometimes caused work to be rushed in order to be finished on time and at times didn't allow changes to be made to coursework once it was handed in. This made it harder to be creative when creating my coursework because everything had to be done for a certain time meaning less time was spent on the tasks and caused some parts to be more simplistic that originally desired. For both pieces of coursework, finding the right location and actors for the artists was difficult, as they had to be aesthetically pleasing but also quite confident in order to look as much like a professional artist as possible. Obviously, using professional actors/models was not realistic, hampering the creativity because the people used in the coursework were not used to doing the tasks asked of them and weren't comfortable some of the time. It was hard to find locations that would work with the theme of the coursework and in some cases this meant improvising, which meant that the creative freedom was lowered as I had to work around the location, rather than finding one that would have fit in well with the theme. The technology used in the coursework also prevented me from being more creative because it wasn't the newest technology on offer and this obstructed the creativity because the work wasn't the best quality and some edits couldn't be applied.
However, I was also quite creative within both the coursework tasks despite the problems that occurred. In my music magazine for my AS coursework I tried to keep the theme of having black and white images relating to my created artist. My double page spread used this effectively by having a grey scale background but my artist being in colour, making her stand out on the page. This also allowed me to have brightly coloured text as it could be read against the background and fulfilled my wish to have bright colours throughout my magazine. In contrast, for the A2 coursework created by Sarah and I, we chose to have darker colours, to fit in with the sombre mood of the song we were using for our video. Having this element in our music video extended to our individual tasks of creating a digipak and magazine advert, which connected everything together. For our video we went through 3 different actors to play our artist, allowing us to try different styles and looks, which I think made our video more creative because we tried so many different ideas. The images I used for my digipak were also quite creative as the photo shoot we had focused on having a wide variety of shots and poses to create a random look and because we used each other for our images we had no images of our artist, an element which is expected within the music industry and in my opinion made both our work creative and original.
Overall, I think that I was quite creative for both of my coursework tasks by using themes and originality to create the look and idea that I wanted. I do think that my A2 coursework was more creative than my AS task, most likely because of the experience I received from creating my AS coursework and because I worked with Sarah for the task, as working together culminated in more ideas and thoughts, giving us more creative ideas to work with.