This is a change from my traditional lifestyle as a lazy-ass. Generally, the time when I do my best thinking is when I'm at work, with a particular client. I work with adults with developmental disabilities. One of my fellas is autistic. He is non-verbal, and just likes to walk in the woods. During nice weather, we'll go to Ft. Ben and walk for hours in silence. I take a notebook with me, and all sorts of ideas come to me during that time. Sadly, the fact that it is very cold stopped that from being a viable option.
The only time that I was able to set aside for thinking this week was during a three hour drive over the weekend. I should pay more attention to driving, but I find it boring, and my mind wanders. While the silent walk in the woods is good for some types of thinking, I need some stimulation in the car, or I'll fall asleep. So before my trip, I synced a few episodes of This American Life to my ipod. For those of you not familiar with This American Life, it is a radio show on NPR. (Although I think they're officially affiliated with American Public Media, but you get the idea)
This American Life is what I like to call, "the best thing on the radio, ever." The show usually has a theme, and there are four or five stories on that theme during the course of the episode. What makes the show magical is the quality of storytelling that these people do. They find all sorts of people with stories that range from fantastic to mundane, and they're all told skillfully, and just make the stories real, with nothing more than voices and music. I'm not doing it justice in my description, but these stories are just perfect.
What does listening to a radio show have to do with my own creative process? Well, this show is inspiring to me. I'm interested in storytelling, and this show is the ultimate in my book. When I listen to the show, I not only think about how they put the shows together structurally, to reveal the key plot points at the correct times, but how they put the shows together thematically. Often, the different stories in the show will approach the theme idea from radically different directions.
In lots of cases, the show will even inspire me to write down my own stories that fit the theme. If I have an experience that fits the subject of the week, I'll often write it down and see where my story fits in with the stories of other people. Listening to this show gets me excited about telling my own stories, and seeking out the experience of others to relate them. Lots of the projects i want to undertake come from ideas sparked by This American Life Episodes.
Now, on to the Final Project. I'm not sure what I'd like to do. If time and scope were no object, I'd like to make a series of music videos for an entire album. I envision many different types of animation, and a few of the songs in live action. They're not necessarily a continuous story, but they have some common themes. The biggest barrier to this is that I don't have the After Effects skills to play out a lot of the ideas that I have. I guess I should start messing with them, and perhaps I could get a couple knocked out by the end of the semester. Or maybe I should come up with a less intimidating plan.
PS: As I've been thinking about this, I did do some reading this week, which is surely a passion of mine. I find that reading, like the radio show above, is great training for storytelling. This week I spent a few hours with "Little, Big" by John Crowley. Not enough people read his stuff. It's fantastic. Check it out.
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