Welcome to issue no. 5 of the Everything Education Newsletter.
In this edition, I'll give you five tips on all things creative – but let me start with some shameless self-promotion, which has actually prompted these tips.
Ta da: Here's the new Everything Education brand video, shot on location in the five cities (and/or towns, hello, Bournemouth!) that I've had the pleasure to spend time in recently.
And now on to the five tips distilled through hours of planning, shooting, editing, dubbing, mixing and colouring...
1 | Less is more.
Through the process of making this video, bit by bit, I've cut my script in half.
If you write, nothing hurts more than getting rid of something that you've already put on paper (or screen).
But trust me, nothing is more satisfying than reading what you write instead – or seeing the flow of your text without what you've just deleted.
And in times like ours, when people feel stretched by watching content for more than 16 seconds, even keeping a video under a minute doesn't guarantee that viewers will reach the end.
So the shorter you keep it, the more likely it is that your audience will actually get your message.
2 | You can always fix it.
Things will go wrong, especially if you're not working with a professional team.
I've had to chuck recordings out because something wasn't right, re-dub words because my intonation just didn't match the next clip, re-record something with a green screen and match it to a clip I recorded for contingency, and recolour the whole sequence to fit together better.
And no, I didn't plan to do this much in post-production, and no, these solutions were not ready in my pocket.
But there's so much know-how out there, not least made available by AI, that whenever you feel it's not right, there's a way to fix it.
Except that:
3 |It's never going to be perfect.
And for a recovering perfectionist like me, it's always going to be hard to accept it.
In fact, I can't.
It'll always bother me that something doesn't look or read as good as I planned it to be.
And it never does.
Thankfully, I've learned to move on, and let it go.
But when someone compliments me for something, I'll still often think of things that aren't right – and so when I reply "thanks, but it really isn't...", that isn't necessarily humbleness: it's frustration.
But again, you can learn to live with it.
4 |It's not going to be how you imagine it.
The beauty of creativity is that the end result of your process is will always look different to what you imagined it to be.
Hopefully good different.
And that's fine.
And if it's bad different, you can always go back to point 2.
5 |Just do(oubt) it.
You'll probably always doubt yourself and your work.
I do anyway.
And that's also fine.
As long as doubting doesn't stop you from doing it.
Well, it doesn't stop me.
Otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.
So yes, just doubt away – but also, just do it still.
Can I help you?
You might have noticed the subtle way I've made you aware that I'm available for consultancy work for schools.
