Creativity Essay

The impact on creativity in a postmodern age

What is creativity? I believe that creativity is the usage of a person's imagination to come up with a completely original invention/idea. However, in a postmodern age, the definition has somewhat changed. Creativity has impacted the postmodern age by allowing the lines of innovation to be slightly blurred, as in this day and age, innovating an old idea by adding to it or changing certain parts can be seen as creative.

From AS to A2, my creative production skills have developed, from trying to create a music magazine from scratch in AS, to producing a horror movie trailer in A2. I believe my creative skills have expanded, as in AS, I did not have full understanding of things such as Photoshop, and Indesign, and I think this was mainly down to the fact that I tried to come up with something completely original, in a world where almost every idea has already been claimed. I tried to create a hip-hop magazine from scratch, without taking in any other ideas from past magazines, as I believed that was the true definition of creativity, but when I did take a look at already existing hip-hop magazines, I noticed that they all have some similarities, but still looked somewhat original. So for my second draft, I started to rearrange my magazine, based on the layout of pre-existing magazines, which helped me immensely, as it gave me a foundation for my ideas, and from there, I could build on them, and expand them, to make my magazine stand out.

“The making of the new and the rearranging  of the old” - Bentley. Taking this mindset onto A2, for my horror film trailer, I have been closely looking at existing horror trailers such as The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity, SAW, etc, to help me with things such as my timeline, finding out what goes in the beginning, middle and end of my trailer for it to feel like a typical horror movie trailer, and I also studied things such as the typical shots, angles, and conventions that are used in horror films, such as the shaking POV camera shot, connoting fear, close-up shots to connote the feeling of being trapped, enclosed, the high angle connoting inferiority of the person on screen, and the low angle connoting dominance. Taking all of these ideas and incorporating it into my A2 trailer has definitely helped with my creativity process, as having the basic foundation for my ideas allows me to be more creative, as I can incorporate my new, original ideas onto the old, existing ones to create something completely new, which is what the definition of creativity is in the postmodern era that we are now living in. Taking the old, rearranging it, and creating something new.