Monday, June 18, 2007

Pumping up Your Creative Energy

What do you do to keep your creative energy pumping?

My husband and I are both in creative fields. In fact, he's a Creative Director in an advertising and design firm. See? "Creative" is in his title! No pressure there. LOL.

If any of you work or know someone who works in advertising and design, then you know the incredible amount of hours and stress that goes into each day/week, with meetings, brainstorm sessions, designing ads, deadlines, presentations, more deadlines, photo and commercial shoots, and post-production sessions. And that's just the creative team, not the accounting, media, traffic, and management teams. It can get crazy.

So with the amount of stress and workload they carry, how do the teams keep up their creative energy and blow off a little steam? By taking an hour or so a week (usually at lunch time) to do something fun, something that bonds the entire company, like going to a Go Kart track...or pretending to be human robots at work (see video below set to music).








Gimme Some Robot...on Vimeo


Which brings me back to my question: What do you do to keep up your creative energy?

I happen to go for a walk when I find I'm stuck on a scene. Getting that blood moving, clearing my head, certainly helps my thinking process. I also love to watch films in which their unique storytelling techniques sweep me away and drive me to be a better writer, a film like The Illusionist (NOT the Hugh Jackman one).

What do you do?

Michele