Creativity essay

Without creativity human beings would be a very dull species, we wouldn't have made the necessary evolutionary steps made to progress over the many years we've been on this earth, and postmodern society as we know it right now would not exist. Creativity is an innate ability to use your imagination and create new things from it by picking apart things you've experienced and witnessed in your daily lives that gave you inspired you in a positive/negative. It is something that us as humans cannot go 100% without. However, originality is something that extremely rare at this day and age. Back in modern society, people were able to create new things, concepts and ways of thinking due to the fact that they were able to put pieces of experiences and what they've witnessed together and come up with an original concept. However, in postmodern society, we've reached a point where all original ideas have been used up and now we can only reuse those ideas and reinvent them into something newer and more exciting. Technology has helped exponentially in how we as humans are able to be creative, and express ourselves fully. Gadgets such as phones, computers, etc have increased our ability to be creative as it has added new elements such as social media platforms, such as instagram that enable us to enhance our beauty, or facebook, which gives us the choice of becoming an entirely different person on social media to the one you are in real life. In a way new technology and gadgets have enhanced the ways in which we are able to communicate with and understand others and the different ways of thinking in the world through the worldwide web, due to the fact that we are able to gain more knowledge on how they work so we can be inspired to create something, as we can communicate with those half a world away, but he also limited communication to those around us as we tend to become addicted to our technology and forget about those around us. Burn and Buckingham said “If creativity is not inherent in human mental powers and is, in fact, social and situational, then technological development may well be linked to the advances in the creativity of individual users”. I interpret this as the fact that most of us no longer have the ability to be originally creative but due to the technological advances we can be creative through the means of others' creations and use that to further develop our inspiration and creativity in order to make something new. It's not impossible to be creative, as it is innate, technology brings it out. The first ever project I done for Media Studies was a preliminary task which involved me creating a college magazine cover. This task was very basic and not creative at all as I had little to no knowledge on how to create a magazine front cover, so I had to copy the template used by a previous student in order to create my own. This was not creative at all because all I was doing was copying the exact layout of the magazine, and posting text and pictures where the previous student, creating an identical copy of what was already created. I had no idea of how to create my own unique version, so I had to leech previous ideas. This was at the beginning of the AS year, and as the year progressed I had accumulated the skills to enable me to create my own magazine cover. The final magazine cover I created was completely different from the first one I had done. The concept was different, the genre was different, the position of conventions were different, the font was completely different and the pictures taken were also different. My reason for creating the cover the way I did was due to inspiration I had garnered from similar magazines of the same genre, researching online on which conventions went where, and analysing various main stream magazine companies. Similarly to the AS preliminary task I completed, over the course of the summer holidays I was given the task of working in a group of 4 and creating a horror movie trailer. This task was t necessarily difficult as during the final weeks of college I had learned what genres of horror there were, certain conventions, what certain themes and objects connoted, we analysed many movies in class, and created the concept of our trailers and how they would be executed. However, the final product itself had certain horror elements but wasn't a horror movie as there were elements from other genres which overpowered the horror in it. However, from that experience I was able to understand what to do and what not to do when creating a horror trailer, and from then till now I have gathered and researched the knowledge needed for me to create my next and final horror trailer.