What’s behind the idea?
I love hearing about the thinking behind creative endeavors. I get a real charge out of watching the “making of “ bonus scenes on movie DVDs, sometimes more than the film itself. I eat up the stories behind breakthrough moments in the development of new products or entire technologies. I totally dig the “Behind the Music” shows on VH1. These glimpses into the creative process can be so revealing.”
Do you have any favorite magical creative moments? I’d love to hear them. Here are a few of mine.
I love the story behind the moment the television technology was conceived? It happened when 14 year-old Philo Farnsworth was tilling his father’s potato field in Iowa. Believe it.
Yep, as he went back and forth across the field with a horse-drawn harrow this brilliant young farm boy was pondering the challenge of reproducing a motion picture electronically, a quandary that had scientists stumped for years. Back and forth, plowing the soil. Back and forth. That’s when it hit him. The electron beam could scan images the same way, line by line, back and forth to give the illusion of a moving image. (Note to DIY Lobotomy survivors: is this not a classic instance of Intergalactic Thinking™?)
You know the movie “Sixth Sense?” The one with the little kid who says, “I see dead people?” Director M. Night Shyamalan speaks about how, on the final edit of the film, in a flash of creative realization, he tried editing out his favorite scene in the film. His original ending scene. The scene he thought would tie the whole story up in a neat package, now lying in a heap on the cutting room floor. And the film was better for it. Wow, talk about being creatively open. I mean, not just this scene or that scene, but his favorite scene.
How about the world of pop music? Do you know Maroon 5’s hit “Getting harder and harder to breathe?” It was conceived when lead singer, Adam Levine, felt creatively stifled by the record producer’s insistence that he write a more commercial song - a “hit,” a radio song - for the band’s “Songs About Jane” CD. “These people are hemming me in. They’re suffocating me. They’re making it harder and harder to breathe. (Light bulb goes on.) Hey, roll tape.” Sounds like one of those “Inside the box” moments Ernie Schenck talks about in his new creative thinking book Houdini Solution.
In case you’re wondering, the song went on to be the band’s breakout hit helping the CD to go platinum.
Of course, the birth of the Post-it note story is legendary. Guy’s new glue formula fails. He doesn’t tell boss. He uses sticky paper as bookmark in his hymn book. Someone asks, “you sure there isn’t an application for this?” The rest is history, with a capitol $.
All ideas come into being some way or another, when the spark of creativity ignites. Sometimes they happen when people are virtually willing them to happen. Sometimes creative brilliance happens when people are just observant to what’s around them (see my post Gifts from the creative Gods). Then there are the instances when big ideas happen when people resist. Or when they appear seemingly out of the blue. And sometimes it’s not when certain conceptual elements are added to the mix, but when they are subtracted.
Not that any of my own magical moments will go down in history, but often I’m even fascinated at how ideas I’m involved with emerge. I remember back in my advertising days, being in the room when the media people were telling a new cereal client that TV was the best way to reach people at breakfast time. “TV?” this shocked client said, “I can’t even afford radio.”
Right at that moment I had an idea for a TV campaign. I thought, let’s put radio spots on television. We went on to shoot a series of low-budget commercials, one with a box of Raisin Bran on a tabletop limbo, medium close up. An announcer says, “At Skinner’s Raisin Bran, we’re a small company, and we can’t afford TV commercials. (The box is still just sitting there.) But we can afford radio…” And at that, a hand comes in from off camera, removes the box, only to reveal a plain old radio sitting there sadly as the voice goes on to sell the breakfast food, ending with “… so we pass the savings on to you.”
Okay, maybe it would have been better had I done this in a potato field.
Do you have any favorite stories behind ideas? Ideas you were part of? Other ideas? I’d love to hear them.
