Loading...

Curiosity and curing The Creative Block

by Leave a Comment

curing creative block

Frame capture from a video project filmed in the Pennsylvania Wilds.

There are many paths that can lead us through The Creative Block. For me, being hyper-curious is method I learned when the block is spotted on the horizon and before it heads my way. It’s a preemptive exercise that helps me avoid being blocked. It’s wanting to know about people, about cities, about places and about other ways of thinking. It’s about being constantly curious and that stems from the journalist in me. Now that the disruptive economy seems to be the standard, it’s a also thought process that has become a daily ritual that helps me adapt and reinvent on demand.

We all have heard or read that “Survival is The New Success.” Even if it’s a bit of a gloomy outlook, there’s truth in that statement. But a disruptive economy is nothing to fear as long as we are willing to adapt. So it’s not just curiosity that we need, it’s a willingness to adopt a different mindset as professional storytellers. And that’s where using creative methods fueled by curiosity comes into play.

Being creative is most often thought of in visual art-based professions to be about fundamentals. Like how we apply rules of composition, use of color, light…so lots of things. But at a different level, it’s about generating ideas and the uniqueness of an image, idea or a story.

So now that curiosity is part of my daily routine I revisit old projects that have been completed. Is there something I missed and can I bring new life to it? And can I find ways to monetize them again? If we dig up those remnants, we can often find unexplored aspects and give them new life. But that’s only part of the equation. There’s plenty of new work to pursue and how do we find that sidebar within the main narrative.

A perfect example is when we started working on the documentary Beyond the Breaker. We had to dive into a foreign culture and again experience what happens often with documentary work. We can start in one direction and discover the most interesting story was elusive and buried in the details that we had yet to discover.

So besides our crash course into coal and how its extraction shaped that region for generations, especially in the context of cultural identity, we also learned about the legacy environmental problems that continue to plague Pennsylvania. There are over 5,000 miles of dead streams in Pennsylvania due to acid mine drainage.  We learned that from EPCAMR whose purpose is to map and clean the waterways affected by mining. But we also learned about coal mine fires. Centralia is a pop-culture destination and the unfortunate tourist attraction. But it’s only one of approximately 80 sites (no one really knows the exact number since these fires are out of sight/mind) in Pennsylvania that have either underground fires where coal seams will burn for hundreds of years, or bank fires that stress the surrounding communities. (Culm banks are those low altitude mounds of mining waste that look like small black mountains scattered throughout Pennsylvania’s landscape).

So where does being creative come in to play? We decided since there already were several films about Centralia, one of the latest, Centralia: Pennsylvania’s Lost Town directed by our colleague Joe Sapienza, we needed a different focus rather than revisiting the stories of the people who once lived there. And upon discovering there are many more coal fueled fires not just in Pennsylvania, or the U.S., we learned mine fires are a world-wide issue.

That led us to create a short film title Scorched that’s making its way around the film festival circuit in 2017-18. There were several goals for Scorched. The main and obvious one was telling the story and increasing awareness starting with Pennsylvania’s fires. A question I had as proof of method was, would our “sidebar” story pass the test of using a hyper-curious approach and yield a creative solution? So far, Yes. We’ve had great feedback, the most important words Tell Us More are always brought up during feedback and post film watching conversation. Lastly, producing Scorched (watch our trailer here) has created opportunities for new work by meeting new clients.

What I’ve learned long ago and what still proves to be effective no matter what you do when technology disrupts us is that we are all hungry for stories. And being curious feeds the creative mind.

For a bit more on this check out Cameron Chapman’s post on Sketchbook for some practical tips.

 

John Welsh is a photographer & storyteller from Philadelphia as well as a director on the National Board of ASMP. He’s a refugee from the land of photojournalism still manages to carve out some truth for his clients.

Scorched – Pennsylvania’s Coal Mine Fires Documentary

by Leave a Comment

Social Media teaser created for the documentary, Scorched: Mine Fires in Pennsylvania Coal Country

It’s strange how life’s detours can take you on different paths really fast. In this case, I had the opportunity to try out some filmmaking ideas in the depths of winter. And I mean deep in the Pennsylvania winter, in 8 degree weather on a Northeast PA mountainside while searching for coal mine fires when it was cold enough to make cell phones freeze.

We’ve been working on Beyond the Breaker, the Huber Breaker documentary for several years (and looking to release in 2018).  Along the way we discovered a significant amount of what plagues Pennsylvania from an environmental perspective. And we aren’t talking about current coal mining issues that are politically supercharged. This is about what was left in the wake when coal operators abandoned their ships and left parts of Pennsylvania in a state of ruin.

We have experienced wading through dead streams the color of rust, or in more technical terms, AMD (Abandoned Mine Drainage) but we also tripped over an obscure and overlooked issue. Coal mine fires. Most people’s knowledge of mine fires stop at Centralia. But that’s just one location out of 80 or so in Pennsylvania. It’s ridiculous and frustrating how these issues have been left mostly unchecked and how Pennsylvania has turned its back on the mining towns that once carried our society into modernity. These fires will last for decades, if not longer, and barely anything is being done to fix this problem.

In December we found out about a brand new film festival, the Philadelphia Environmental Film Fest, so we (Alana Mauger, Mark Clement and Robert Hughes of EPCAMR) scraped together a plan and in about 4 days we shot several locations, finished the edit and recorded original music (special thanks to Sheila Hershey, Charlie Hannagan and Jacopo De Nicola for mixing and mastering) in time for the submission deadline.

So, challenge completed and successful. Scorched is currently making it’s way around the country and being shown in several film festivals. While festivals are sometimes thought of as merely vanity events, they are good places to network and compare your content to work being created by other filmmakers and should be one piece of an overall business strategy that can help you gain exposure.

And to throw in some basic policy that’s being ignored (and why we do documentary work) here’s that bit about the right to good health in the Pennsylvania Constitution:

Article 1, Section 27:

“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all of the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”

 

Storytelling & video projects when working as a one-man crew

by

(Above, a short video created to show flavor of the NEPA coal mining region & community for the  film, Beyond the Breaker, and where we found the title from John Kish, former town barber in Ashley, Pennsylvania).

Hunting, Fishing & Drilling. Those are three things a traveler expects to find in the northern parts of Pennsylvania these days. But I also relate them to the capture and editing of video and they help me frame how to improve being a professional storyteller.

Most of my storytelling experience comes from working as a photojournalist. Of course, I’ve worked with writers while photographing stories, but my best work is shot while alone. During my evolution when I first integrated video to my still photography, and while Hunting for stories, I purposefully worked alone. And during interviews, when I Fish, I’m often on my own, tossing tightly focused questions to my subjects hoping to reel in a gem contained within a soundbite.

Working alone has tradeoffs. Specifically, the amount of equipment to setup plus your ability to divide attention between camera, audio and interviewing. But I think for anyone starting off, it’s perfectly fine to toss yourself into the fire, in a low risk situation (like a personal project), and see what you can create.

When it comes to The Edit, I think of the Drilling. It’s how you go into the deeper parts of the story and find your cinematic gold.

Often, I’m aware of the perfect sentence that sums up the entire story as soon as it’s spoken; and when it’s memorable, you don’t even need to keep notes. That clip is probably the first one you’ll watch upon initial review, and it will probably guide you towards your first cut.

But what about the hidden elements of a story? Ones that are really important and ones that are buried within longer questions. An example comes to mind regarding a documentary about community identity and the history of the coal industry.

We’ve interviewed former miners, historians, state politicians and even the former Ashley, Pennsylvania town barber. And while we were using a wide net to gather these stories, we didn’t have a title even after a year of filming. That’s until we reviewed (and drilled into) an interview with the town barber. There, within an interview we weren’t sure we would ever use, we found our film’s title. It was incredibly obvious in hindsight, but without a thorough review process, and hours of drilling, we may have been searching a lot longer.

So is it best to work alone? Maybe. You’ll make mistakes for sure, but as long as you view them as part of learning, it’s important to experience the entire process on your own.

Should you edit alone? Also a “Maybe.”‘ If you are an accomplished shooter and can communicate your vision to an editor, then it’s very efficient and the right editor can transform your work in amazing ways.

But at some point, whether it’s a solo attempt at a short film, a spec commercial or creating an About Page video , it’s worth the time you’ll invest even if you feel like you are fumbling. What you’ll learn is far greater than the energy spent to learn new software and the mechanics of workflow.

 

Previously published on ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog.

John Welsh is a photographer & storyteller from Philadelphia as well as a director on the National Board of ASMP. He’s a refugee from the land of photojournalism and still manages to carve out some truth for his clients.