Creativity Essay

Outline the Extent to Which You Were Creative in Your As and A2 Coursework Tasks.

Creativity is a very wide area and there are many ways to be creative within work. One of these is originality; creating something new and individual.  At AS I think that my music magazine was different to most because it had clear focus on the females within the rock genre without the male gaze used as an element too much. This also meant that it had more of a focus on a female audience too. I think that this was an original idea because I hadn't seen it done before and though there a lot of great female artists within the rock genre I feel that they aren't as widely known as others. Also, female fronted rock bands are mainly what I listen to so I had quite a wide knowledge of it before I started. 

                Another part of creativity is the imagination you put into a project or product and the vision that you have for it initially.  The imaginative part of the project came when I was planning the music magazine. I had to choose a colour scheme, fonts and an aesthetic theme that fit the genre and that I was happy with. Though a lot of this was inspired by other rock music magazines and existing products I definitely had my own ideas and the ideas brought up from audience feedback. At A2 the idea for the music video came to me very quickly and the vision that I had for it was very similar to the end product. There were a lot of creative elements to think about such as costume, location, shots and props. I was really happy with the aesthetics of the end product and this had all come down to the initial planning and vision.

Inspiration was a huge part of being creative, especially as at AS I hadn’t done anything like this before and it was important to get an idea of how products were created and how they looked before I began creating my own. As I said I was inspired by other rock music magazines, the main one being 'Kerrang!'. I was inspired a lot by this for the layout of my magazine and it was very helpful to have an existing product to refer back too. I think the inspiration helped me to be creative and in the end helped me to create a good product. At A2 the inspiration we had was from videos of female fronted rock and rock/pop bands and this had a huge influence on our video. It made it a lot easier to envision our own video and made the planning process quicker. It was also nice to have an existing product to refer back to, meaning that our product became more professional looking. For the ancillary products the inspiration came from quite conventional rock themes and dark imagery such as skulls. 

Another part of being creative is being resourceful and working around the boundaries and limitations we had with ingenuity. Because of the limited time we had to create the products it was a challenge but I made sure to plan well in advance and I tried to be as organised as possible. Because of timing I didn't get to take all the pictures I would have like too, meaning that some of the images I used were actually just from concerts I had been too, but worked well as thumbnails for 'posters'. Again, at A2, time was an issue, especially when shooting for the video. We had to work around our own schedules as well as weather and daylight. We usually shot the outside shots while it was still light and when it began to get darker we'd do any inside performance shots which evened it out and meant that we weren't wasting time.

Compared to my preliminary music magazine my work had improved greatly. Throughout the course I learnt about conventions that would help my product to look more professional. I also felt more confident using programmes such as Photoshop meaning that my editing was much better than when I first started.