Kill Your Darlings

One of the hardest things for most creative jobs is the task of killing your darlings. For a piece of work to be greater than the sum of its parts it must discard of those parts that, whilst individually hold potential, do not achieve a symbiosis with the rest of the work. I have slowly been chipping away at my sentimentality throughout the years and this project is no different. Earlier on in the semester I did an experiment on digital blooms, where I trialed the idea of using a kaleidoscopic effect preset on After Effects to create digital flowers. I believed (and still do) that this resonates with the song strongly, but it was abundantly clear, even by the rough cut stage, that this concept had no place in the music video we were creating. There was no entry point in which it would be anything but jarring and ultimately it would detract significantly from the rest of the footage we had collected. I am proud to say that it didn’t take too much effort for me to let this go. Perhaps it was the blatant obviousness of a lack of cohesion but as soon as it was obvious that this experiment didn’t have a place in the final work I left it to the wayside and continued with the temporal, opacity effects within the instrumental sections of the song.

I think what has helped me to be able to let go of these things is an understanding and valuing of the greater project as a whole, over minute areas of creativity. It is easy to develop tunnel vision, especially when editing for hours on end, but one must be able to sit back and see the greater direction of the whole projects and what creative decisions stand within the bounds of that path. Valuing the end product and keeping my team members in mind made it easy to see the project with pragmatic eyes and assess what would and wouldn’t work. Whilst it is a shame that I cannot use the experiment now, I must content myself with the knowledge that I can use it later on in a project to which it is better suited.