Mundane Constraints... Why do they unlock creativity?

Ordinary can be awesome when you embrace it

This is part 3 of sharing reworked excerpts from my unedited interview with It’s Nice That. Part 1 talked about where inspiration comes from. Part 2 was about creativity traps. Today I talk about constraints. The boring kind that are easy to under-value. Because that’s where the magic hides.

A hard part about creating original work is picking your subject matter. How do you decide? It feels like you should only pick exciting things. But you look around and you can’t see anything that rises to the level of being worthy of selecting as a subject. It zaps your motivation when you can’t even decide what is worthy of your attention. Constraints can help.

Self-imposed constraints can be anything. Maybe you constrain your songs to only be recorded on tape. Maybe you make a rule that you can’t use paint brushes. Maybe every photo you share needs to have a bird in it. It literally could be anything, and the harder the constraint, the more interesting it will be. This is counter-intuitive but true. People will respond better to your work when they can recognize the constraint and then watch you play inside that box than if you change direction drastically from project to project. And you will find freedom inside the constraints because you can iterate and work towards mastery instead of fretting about what you will make next.

The constraint I’ve chosen is that my animations must always loop as seamlessly as possible. This constraint lower my expectations when it comes to choosing subject matter. Instead of starting with incredible source material, I force myself to look for things that I can make seamless loops from. I am trying to hide the beginnings and ends of the animation so it can just repeat infinitely without hiccups. This really limits what I can make because most videos don’t repeat like that. Birds, butterflies, dancers... these are easier to loop because they naturally have repetitive movements.

The harder subjects are humans, but they are much more rewarding because when you loop a human it takes on greater meaning. The woman taking out the trash, her job never ends. The spinning dancer never gets a break. The runner never arrives at the finish line. The coffee drinker’s cup never empties.

I just finished an animation of a boy on a bike who crashes into another bike. But the bike he crashes into is actually his bike from earlier in the same animation. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to representing the absurdity of human activities... we keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.

Does the mundanity of these moments makes them more interesting? I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure. My animations can be very visually intense, almost strobe-light like. I think that’s what grab’s people’s attention. I have this fear that people never get past this surface level and arrive at the more interesting ideas. They might just hit the like button and swipe by. But it’s there, hiding in plain sight if people want to see it.

Constraints force you to find creative ways to outdo yourself. I am always remixing and looking for a better angle for things. There’s a definition of creativity that I’ve latched on to that says,

“Creativity is taking two unrelated things and watching what happens when you force them to collide with each other.”

I’m always on the lookout for surfaces that I might be able to let my animations collide with. I collect material without having a clear idea about what I’m going to do with them. It takes a while for ideas to incubate. For example, every time I flew on an airplane I would steal the safety card from my seat. I didn’t know what I would do with them, but they were interesting to me. Recently I used them in an animation where air travel artifacts are combined with a goose in flight.

Finding interesting aspects of ordinary things changes how you experience everyday life. You’ll find it harder to ignore small, seemingly insignificant details. I have worked as a graphic designer and UX designer as my career and this is an occupation where you are always identifying and trying to eliminate the tiniest of flaws. And you are trained to identify the “why” behind things by noticing details most people never think about. What’s different about my creative practice from my professional life is that I allow myself to appreciate things as they are without hunting for flaws.

I used to be more of a perfectionist. I am constantly reminding myself not to over-engineer things. I’ve learned that the flaws and normality of our surroundings is far more interesting than synthesized perfection. Polishing things to perfection is easy, finding the beauty in things as they are without needing to change them, that’s the real challenge.

For people who feel like their daily routines are repetitive or uninspiring, here’s my advice. If you feel uninspired by your situation you are not alone. Sometimes there are tasks that are just going to be a grind. And not just a grind, but often your attempts to inject beauty into the process are going to be actively opposed by the people around you. I wrote a book called Art of the Living Dead that’s a guide for creative people struggling to survive in a world that wants to destroy their creativity. The metaphor is zombies, because that’s what it can feel like. Finding beauty in the mundane shifts the horror show into something transformative. If you feel stuck, the fix might be more friction, not less. Because constraints have a way of unlocking new pathways what previously seemed blocked.

Thanks for reading. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade