The shape of creative ideas

In the latest edition of the great Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive newsletter, this caught my eye:

John [from the newsletter, interviewer]: Let’s say you’re starting to ani­mate a scene. You’re trying to figure out how to posi­tion everything, how things should progress from one part to the next. What’s going into your drawings, step by step?

Aaron [Blaise, animator]: Cre­ating an ani­mated film is, like you said, a step-by-step process. When I’m writing a story, when I’m cre­ating an ani­mated film — like Snow Bear, for instance — it starts with an idea.

It lit­er­ally started as I was washing my hair in the shower. It was, “I want to ani­mate a single char­acter in a simple environment.” And that evolved to, “How about a polar bear in the Arctic? Because that seems simple.” (Ultimately, it wasn’t [laughs].) Which evolved to, “I’m gonna write a treat­ment for this.” The one-sentence logline: a lonely polar bear in the Arctic can’t make any friends, so he makes a snow bear to keep him­self company. How do I flesh this out? What are the steps that he goes through?

When I got to “it starts with an idea”, my eyes began to roll, but then Aaron’s clar­i­fi­ca­tion snapped them back into place. I apol­o­gize for my lack of faith!

Here’s my claim: expe­ri­enced cre­ative people do not begin projects with emo­tive ideas or “stories” (🙄) unteth­ered to a spe­cific medium. Rather, they begin with a sense of what they want to do in a medium they love. Often, the vision is mechanical, basi­cally physical, as in Aaron’s example: “I want to ani­mate a single char­acter in a simple environment.”

You could imagine a video game devel­oper saying, “I want to make an insane JRPG”, or a writer saying, “It’s finally time for me to write that cozy mystery … ” You can go beyond genre, too: Nicholson Baker said, “I want to wake up every morning, leave my laptop screen at its dimmest setting, and write in the space between sleep and waking.” Okay!

So: Aaron Blaise’s “idea” was not “a lonely polar bear in the Arctic can’t make any friends”. That came later. This is simple but important, because I think some observers and many char­la­tans (!) want to tell you the “lonely polar bear”, the emo­tional impulse, nec­es­sarily comes first.

Art is fused with craft; craft is made of practice; and all of it is sort of stretched across the arma­ture of genre. Cre­ative work begins with an impulse for WORK, the kind of thing you want to spend your time doing, to which nar­ra­tive and emo­tional mate­rial is quickly added.