Creativity part 2

For my next battle with creativity I thought I would do a bit of a history lesson, my idea is to share what I consider creative times in mankind’s past. I thought I would spend some time thinking about this partly because it is interesting and partly because I want to see Beowulf, (as it revolves around the 6^th century) mind you I don’t want to see it because of the time line it was based around, I want to see just how bad it really is.

Anyway I digress from the point I was trying to make. I could tell you when mankinds first signs of creative thought were noticed, or recite some interesting poetry but it wouldn’t of have much thought put into it really.

The first thing that I would like to mention is the Tiki statues. These statues belong to tribes that border the South Pacific Ocean and are carved out of wood, they are placed to mark and protect boundaries to sacred places of worship. Why are they interesting? Just take a glace at them and I think that you’ll agree that they captivate straight away. Anything that resembles human form but blatantly isn’t has an eerie feeling about it. They also come in really interesting and tribal shapes and sizes. Like the heads on Easter Island there is something unsettling and eerie about them, which is perhaps why I like them so much.

Another thing that I would like to mention is Norse mythology, it was only after playing age of mythology that I really got interested in mythical legends, so it proves that games ARE good for you and that everyone should play them. Anyway I wouldn’t say that I’m only interested in Norse mythology, every religion has a wealth of interesting, morel and diverse stories, all these legends and fables enlighten the communities. In a way living in all this modern technology strips away communities and everyone sits in front of a computer to do their talking, any interesting ‘fable’ is usually some video on Youtube. We live in an age where we don’t need to hear about David and Goliath or Jason and the Argonauts since we all have Xbox 360’s. I’m probably going on a tangent here and completely going off the subject and ranting about old-fashioned values and such so I’ll talk about something different now. I always loved learning about history and was an avid fan of those horrible history books. Another historic age that I liked would be the Tudor age, as a child I often thought what it would be like living around that time, my guess is that it would have been a lot like Neverwinter Nights – or so I believed, except there would have been no mages or 5+ swords back in those days. Perhaps this is why games with strong senses of historic influence always appeal to me, such as Neverwinter nights or Fable.

Since there was limited technology and such everywhere had a strong sense of individualism and originality which doesn’t really happen these days since land is limited and such things, which is why the past is so fascinating, as it is so diverse. It seems that the closer people get with communicating, the world seems to get smaller and smaller, the modern man is less and less interested in religion as they used to be and the morels of man seemed to of changed, the future is focused on technology. Which, since I am doing a career, which didn’t even exist a century ago, is a good thing- there are far more opportunities for people that are trained in new technology.

I guess I could say that I find a lot of things creative such as games, art, books, films etc, but I bet everyone does. In inspiration, the past is always intriguing and will probably always be looked upon for creative ideas.

Creativity Part 1

Alas I admit I haven’t done much blogging for a while so my skills might be a bit rusty, it took me ages to try and remember my password to even log on to blogger, which wasn’t the smoothest start for sure.

The task at hand is to try and write about creativity although we have already tried to do a post on that earlier last year this time is to get deep enough and try to understand it enough to pan out six weeks worth of blogs.

Since this post is the beginning of those posts I thought I might as well start at the beginning of creativity and what it means to me. I shall start at the beginning of my creativity and how I ended up doing game art as opposed to other courses.

My parents were not exactly the creative type; they worked in office-based jobs and didn’t pursue any higher education. On my dad’s side there is very little creative pursuits or creative careers. However on my mom’s side there is about 5 generations of women who all specialised in arts and craft such as knitting, sewing and such, however this was only the women as all the men had heavy labour jobs. My brother and I were always encouraged to do our best at anything we tried our hand at when we were growing up however we both didn’t really excel in anything worth noting, I wasn’t particular sporty nor academic. Teachers always noted that I was a bit of a day dreamer and enjoyed creative writing and anything that wasn’t constricting on what I was expected to produce.

Growing up my aspirations were to be doing something theatrical or writing as although I had always enjoyed art I had no inspiration to go through with it and take it any higher. However at my school there wasn’t really any encouragement with art , this followed on from primary school to secondary school where your imagination is limited by the school curriculum. In my secondary school years I found myself most frustrated with art since I had found something that truly had inspired me, dare I say it…anime. Perhaps a cliché in this day and age, since it seems that everyone is into it and Japanese animation is very popular on today’s television. However when I watched for the first time, it seemed like no one knew about it, it was like my own private inspiration source, however cheesy it might seem like now. I increasingly wanted to do my own stuff, find my own style but never really had the chance to do that in secondary school as it was very strict, anything unconventional was frowned upon and discarded. The teacher was very narrow-minded and traditional and all the art projects were centred around copying another world famous (and dead) artist. It was exceedingly mind numbing stuff and I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of school to go to college.

Except that it wasn’t really that much better, it was more work, more pressure and even more Van Gogh. I wasn’t even on a fine art course, it was a B-Tec in Art and design. Well I don’t think I’ll talk about those two years and skip straight on to University.

I think the difference struck me immediately since I was so use to teacher leaning over my shoulder and breathing down my neck so it was quite nice to have freedom and a bit of an escape from that. It was like being thrown into the deep end since I was so used to having each lesson structured minute by minute that only having a loose brief to work to was a bit of a shock to the system, my guess is that many people felt the same way.

Alas I feel as though I am straying from my initial thought on creativity, the point that I am trying to make is what creativity means to me as an individual which is the freedom to explore my own ideas not somebody else’s. I don’t think it’s particularly creative copying somebody else’s work, to me that is stifling. I want to work with creative people to share unique thoughts and work on interesting projects. Creativity to me is freedom to express my thoughts and views yet also to think of new ways to explore a subject or topic. Creativity is such an evasive topic to discuss as it can mean so many things but still be unique to one idea about it.