A Change of Scenery: University

"Change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon."

The Sixth Doctor - Warriors of the Deep - Doctor Who - 1984

Throughout your life you go through many personal changes; some good, many bad. These changes will obviously affect you as a person therefore your ideas will change. The things you get inspirations from change, your ideas get affected. This can be great; if not a little daunting.

I would say being a creative person is both a blessing and a curse. Some of you reading will understand this. When people know you for being creative, there is an added pressure to create. More pressure to improve on previous ideas and creations. The reality is that you can only do your best. Create for you first - the rest of the world second. You can't be creative all of the time, ideas aren't always good and sometimes just life can get in the way.

When I first moved out of my childhood home and started university, coming up with ideas and getting inspiration was incredibly difficult for me. I remember sat in my first ever seminar meeting all of these people for the first time and being asked to come up with a short film concept to be made at the end of the week. We were only allowed to use still images... Quite literally thrown in at the deep end. I found it hard to come up with film concepts because of a number of reasons. One of those being the fact that I felt a huge amount of pressure for my idea to be 'uni worthy'. By that I mean, an idea/film of a higher standard that I had ever made before. This pressure made me over-think everything, I would think that my idea simply wasn't good enough to make/show anyone. In many cases, the ideas I came up with were probably decent concepts; I just lacked the confidences.

One of the main/biggest hurdles to overcome was forming a group of creative individuals (complete strangers) in a short space of time to create the best short film we could in under four days. The team of people I ended up working with are now my closest friends I have made while on my degree. In the end our short film was one of the more successful ideas I think we had as a group. It's an idea I think we could come back to in the future.

As the days and weeks moved on, I became more and more confident in my surroundings (both living away from home and being at university). It became a whole lot easier to think up new ideas. If you can take anything away from my experience I would like you to understand that even if you are struggling generating new ideas, don't get bogged down in the 'it's not good enough' trap. The chances are that your idea is fabulous and completely find to push for, you just need to relax and remember that you make things because you want to, not because you have to. Obviously my ideas were for a degree so I did sorta have to create something, however, I have the scope of anything I wanted to do as long as it fitted out vague brief.

So there we have it, my take on what it was like going to university and what happened to my creativity. Feel free to drop me a line in the comments on what affects your creativity.

Keep telling stories,

Josh Barker