The creative impulse is such that, when struck by new inspiration - an idea, mood, theme, characters, or a story - suddenly your mind buzzes a million miles an hour, urging you to dig in and put it down on paper while the creative muse is with you.
So, it no doubt sounds counter-productive when I say: stop right there!
As a creative person you have no shortage of good ideas. In fact, the opposite is likely true: they hover at your periphery, haunting your every move, trying to seduce and/or guilt trip you into paying attention to this idea over everything else in your life. The problem is, when you devote time first to the creative impulse, without heed to the pointy end of the stick, you get trapped into the cycle of “struggle.”
You will devote countless weeks, months, even years to the project, forced to keep another job to pay your bills, exhausting yourself with overwork, damaging your relationships, and at the end of it: you will be in exactly the same position as when you started.
However, if you identify a profitable business model first, it is much easier to develop a creative idea that will fit over it, thus satisfying your artistic urge as well as financial needs. Please don’t get scared off by the words “business model”... this can be a creative, innovative, and fun process, it’s just a matter of rethinking the order in which you do things.What exactly do I mean?
I have a great movie idea. My end goal is for it to be made into a film and seen by the largest possible relevant audience. But there are significant barriers to achieving that plan.
Firstly, the script isn’t finished yet. I’ve been working on it - around paid work, around other creative projects, around being a parent, around home renovations, around a failing relationship, around life - for several years now. It needs another 1-2 drafts, it will need an experienced producer, it will need finance, it will need to get past numerous Gatekeepers (funding bodies, investors, distributors, exhibitors, talent agents, etc) who possibly won’t ‘get’ it...
In Australia, it takes 7 years on average for a film to get made, not including the thousands of screenplays that never get made, and films usually tank and die largely unseen and unprofitable. Is this a good business model? To spend years working on a project unpaid, in the hope that one day, against all odds, it might get made - in which case I will be paid an amount far less than the time I have invested.
Obviously not a good business model.
However, the creative me is haunted by the idea, the story, the characters, and I am not willing to give up on it.
And that’s okay: if we don’t feed our creativity, we become drones. I’m not saying that you should give up on an idea because the current business model sucks. What I’m saying is, before I put more time into the creative development of this idea, I am going to explore how I can improve the business model so that it will work for me. Then I can go forward with a way to ensure my projects profitability.
Next post will be a case study of a film that has reinvented the traditional film making process by circumventing the risks.
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