Tutorial for generating creative ideasfrom @neighborhoodartsupply

Transcript

Here's how to generate ideas like a creative director. For a lot of music artists, the music itself can actually be the easy part. Figuring out what kind of story to wrap it in, now that's harder. So how do you actually figure out what kind of sandbox your new music tier should be in, and then how do you unravel the different creative ideas against best. So there's one great exercise for fleshing this out, and it's a Japanese brainstorming technique called the Lotus Blossom Method. Now the Lotus Method forces you to start with foundation. So here's what you're gonna do. Take a piece of paper and draw a box in the middle. Inside that box, write new era, new chapter. Then around that center box, create eight different categories that could influence what this era becomes. For music artists, I would start with categories like this. One, music. Two, personal life. What's going on with you personally right no? Three, new obsessions. What are you currently obsessed with? Four, visual world and world building. Five, movies or TV shows. Six, fashion. Seven, tier. And eight, environments. Each one of those categories becomes its own new lotus. So around the music category, you might write eight things happening in your music right now. Maybe you're using more live instruments, maybe the records are getting darker, or maybe your lyrics are becoming more story driven and are becoming more personal. Don't judge any of it yes, just write it. Then move to personal life. What are you experiencing in your personal life right now? Maybe you just moved tier. Maybe you're burned out from touring. Maybe you're becoming obsessed with fitness. All those things are creative material that can play into the era or the chapter. So if you fill out eight categories with eight ideas, you've suddenly generated 64 different pieces of creative material to mine from. So instead of magically trying to invent an era just by digging for some mood boards, you now have real concrete creative ideas that are tied to you. But there's more, and what comes next is the most important part. The next part of this exercise is to look for intersections. Where do the petals from the different flowers connect? For example, maybe your music is becoming more minimal. You're newly obsessed with brutalist architecture. You're currently only into black, gray, and red clothing. And then you're fascinated by stories and movies about rebellion and freedom. By themselves, they're stand alone facts, but with the Lotus Method, they're now completely related. Your era shouldn't necessarily come from one standout idea. It should come from a collision of several different things that are authentically happening in your life at the same time. So once you have all of your ideas, all of your different lotus flowers, create your A Beautiful Mind type board, and then make your connections. First, circle the ideas that have the highest emotional charge for you personally, but then start combining things. And by doing all this, we're asking a better question. Instead of asking, what are my favorite artists doing right now? What are my peers doing? What's trending? You're asking what world defines where I am personally and creatively right no? And you're also asking how can that world be expressed through tier? And should you need, we actually have a high level art direction playbook that can be helpful in organizing your mood boards and visual ideas. For that, comment playbook, and we'll send it over for free.