An introduction to creativity. Task 5 (Hammond).

This is what Pete Fraser, the chief examiner for OCR Media Studies, has to say about creativity:

"One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

 

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). An interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts."

Last two paragraphs in 5 statements:

• No free choice as if we are wroking with constraints, we will be more creative.
• Genre helps you to be creative as different sturcures show us different things in that we can play around with.
• Creative has a meaning of making an idea into something real.
• Creativity can be a random/collaborative act.
• Elitist version is for those who are highly skilled for example musicians.

5 key words:

• Constraints
• Genre
• Ideas
• Something real
• Elitist version that are highly skilled

In relation to my coursework:

Constraints- harder to get a good room or place to take our shots and also time and money as we are only students at the end of the day.
Genre- The genre of the songs we picked helped us to decide what was going to be shown in our music video
Ideas- Our ideas bounced off each other and new ideas came along as we were creating our music video
Something real- How we made our video and ancillary texts seem real by making them be similar to the professional ones
Elitist version that are highly skilled- By looking at real media products and having them help to give ideas that would help make my media products look as good as they could do.

Cd cover task

The level of creativity of this is not too high as i was given pieces to work with however i did have to pick the fonts and also the layout of the CD cover. Therefore i would say it is creative in a kind of was as i had to make random words and a picture fit together. I went with stencil type of writing because I thought that it matched well with the name of the band with the armed forces. Also the colour of the text go well with the picture as it keeps it cold but still looks good. Comparing this to my AS work it that i can be creative much easier as i know what tools i can work with and i can be more adventurous as i am much more confident with how i use my skills. However for my A2 work i would say i have improved from that massively here just that i am on the same level and that i know how get things to work together better.

Task question

How creative have you been in your AS and A2 productions?

I have been creative in both my AS and A2 production i have just used the creativity in a different way for each year. In my first year of AS i was creative but i did not dare to do some of my ideas because of how new everything was to me and i wasn't quite sure what was wrong or right. Therefore i dd not use my creativity to my best ability. However when i started getting into the task of making a music magazine and i step out of my comfort zone a bit more and thought of new and better things i could add.  An example of this is when i made the first magazine which was a school magazine. The colours in this were very limited and the use of font and layout was very boring and did not go together at all. Then when i got onto my music magazine i could understand more how colours and layouts worked better and i was able to create something much better.
As for my A2 year this then again happened with my draft of my music advert and my digipack. The initial draft ideas were plain and simple and the layout was not great it was like a good AS piece. Therefore when i did my final music advert and digipack designs i used much more creativity with the way i used things. An example of this would be that i painted my own picture to put on the back and in the middle of my digipack. I thought of the way i wanted it to look and this showed how much more it was in creativity terms. I also was much more confident with the programs and so decided to step out of my comfort zone by clicking new things as i knew i could change then back easily as my skills had improved massively. As for my music video, I cam up with the basic story line and so then me and Laura worked around it my adding in bits that would fit better. The whole of our video is full of creativity as this goes for the costume, the mise en scene, and the theme of our video. Our teacher said that it was cleverly done and that it was cery creative in that way in which we used the spaces thatw ere avalible to us.