No labels, no limits
My favorite basketball player once said, if you don’t know where you’re going, nobody can stop you.
I’ve always appreciated the playfulness and flexibility of that mindset. It’s not a bad way to play the game. In fact, it’s not a bad strategy for approaching the creative process.
Life is boring when we know all the answers. When we’ve already decided exactly what we’re making or where we’re going, our work can only be as good as that. On the other hand, when we objectify the creative process and suspend our need to categorize, we invite projects to expand into unexpected territory. We allow the work to adapt and evolve.
When I started working on this documentary, I didn’t know I was making a movie until a year into the project. One day, I just stepped back from the project and thought, I think this thing wants to be a film. So I listened.
But had I decided that at the onset of the process, it wouldn’t have organically blossomed into the work of art it is today.
In this example, I was creating medium agnostic. Instead of locking the work into a single form, I kept the idea in permanent beta. Instead of forcing my own expectations on the work, I allowed patterns to emerge. And when the time came for the documentary to announce itself, all I had to do was listen and say yes.
Are your expectations serving or frustrating you?