How to face challenges in the creative process
I just finished watching several “making of” featurettes for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” film trilogy. Though I am an artist who works in a different medium, I found it incredibly encouraging to hear those filmmakers share their creative process. This included hearing about the challenges they faced and how they overcome them. I offer what I observed in hopes that it’ll help my fellow creatives as much as it helped me. To begin, it seems that challenges in the creative process typically come in three varieties:
1. Expectations Challenges: This is the “What do they really want?” question as related to client desires. Of course, this challenge can be alleviated somewhat by a thoughtful and detailed pre-production collaboration process. But even despite this, it seems that nearly every artist – me, included – is at least mildly haunted throughout the creative process with the pesky question, “Will they actually like it?” When it came to creating The Hobbit movies, the creative teams faced and framed this challenge in terms of fan expectations, re: “What do the fans expect?” For them, one of the biggest challenges of this kind surrounded the design of the tale’s iconic, fire-breathing, gold-addicted dragon, Smaug. It was fascinating to watch the creative team wrestle with what moviegoers expected in this main character’s design. In facing this challenge, the number of concept drawings, renderings, and test animations the team produced numbered in the dozens!
2. Technical Challenges: This is the “Now that we’ve agreed on the design, how do we execute it?” question. This is a prevalent question with creatives who dream up really cool ideas and then have to figure out how to actually bring those ideas to fruition. Answering it involves thinking through materials, engineering, technology, budgets, prototypes, and a host of other considerations. In creating The Hobbit movies, crews faced many such challenges as conceptual artists and director Peter Jackson came up with really cool action sequences. The dwarves’ escape from the elves’ woodland prison by floating in empty wine barrels down a river was one such challenge. Another constant challenge was filming characters of various heights in the same scene (short dwarves and hobbits next to tall men, trolls, goblins, and orcs).
3. Unexpected Challenges: This is the “What do we do now that this happened?” question. It includes totally unplanned issues that crop up while engaged in the creative process. In filming The Hobbit, this happened when a large outdoor set was built around an iconic, very old, real, and beautiful tree. The day before filming was to begin, a huge wind storm uprooted the tree! Thankfully, it didn’t fall on the set. Still, the crew now had to remove several tons of fallen wood and figure out how to replace that iconic tree as a centerpiece of the set.
As I watched The Hobbit’s making-of featurettes, I came away with at least three encouragements for fruitfully facing these creative-process challenges.
1. Normalize Challenges. Through the dozens of hours of making-of Hobbit featurettes, it became very clear that those creative teams expected to face challenges throughout the filmmaking process. Part of this is because they had worked for years together on The Lord of the Rings trilogy before making The Hobbit and had learned as much from that experience. And all this was true despite the fact that these same teams won a total of 17 Academy Awards out of 30 nominations for The Lord of the Rings trilogy! In addition, The Return of the King filmmakers won 11 Oscars, achieving a clean sweep of all its nominations. So, if such challenges are normal for such a stellar team, they’ll be normal for me! In other words, we’re not failures when we face challenges in our creative process. This idea brings relief at the core of our being, dispelling any sense of false shame or guilt that we sometimes attached to challenges and that can cripple our response to them.
2. Work together. Contrary to my expectations, The Hobbit’s creative teams communicated and collaborated more robustly when they faced creative challenges. I found this inspiring because, when I face challenges, I tend to feel like a failure, isolating myself in self-induced shame and self-reliance. Instead, I’m reminded that it’s important to reach out to others and honestly share the challenges and solution-making process. In fact, a healthy creative team will be a safe place for such collaboration.
3. Expect greatness. In nearly every case, The Hobbit’s creative teams came to expect that the challenges they faced would produce better creative outcomes. Perhaps this is a creative’s version of “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Or, on an elevated note, perhaps it’s a version of King Solomon’s wisdom in Proverbs 25:4, “Remove the dross from silver, and the sterling will be ready for the silversmith.” In other words, a heated crucible purifies and yields more beautiful results. Viewing challenges in the creative process this way can actually reframe them as good things!
As a fellow creative, what have you learned about facing challenges in your creative process that might help us all face them fruitfully?