Youtube

One recent innovation that it extremely easy to talk about regarding creativity is YouTube.  YT came into the scene a few years ago as a simple site that allows people to share short videos with each other.  This eliminates email attachments or USB flash drives or any of these inconvenient steps that used to be the means of sharing video.  Many other sites have now developed this video sharing aspect such as facebook and myspace and other social networking sites.  YT has strict rules when it comes to uploading videos.  The material must be yours, or you must have proper permission to post the video and its contents.  The content must be rated accordingly because nudity is not permitted.  This provides many people opportunities.  For example, certain people who post videos have been discovered for their amazing talents.  One of my favorite musicians I discovered on YT about a year ago, Ronald Jenkees.  He is a nerdy keyboardist who improvs off of previous beats, that he willingly credits, or beats that he makes himself.  His music is amazing, and on top of that he freestyles everything off the top of his head because he finds this is much more "fun," as he states many times in his videos, which makes people respect his talent.  Other people such as Bo Burnham, a young, suburban-type white kid who raps amazing lyrics that he writes in all metaphors, have been discovered and signed through YT.  His lyrics make you pause to stop and understand each line he says; he is ridiculously funny as well with his accuracy when making fun of certain topics such as high school parties.  YT is a one of many easy new ways now to get your name out there amongst the public.  If people like your stuff, they view it and rate and comment it, which makes your video "hot" on the YT network.  Contractors notice these "hot" people and look further into them, which leads to most of their success.  In this aspect, these people can be considered the representation of "real music" because the people vote on them.  They are not simply signed through politics like knowing someone in the business, or etc.  The fact that they are recognized by the big boys is because the people have voted on them, which means that they are almost guaranteed success.  The innovation of YT provides all of this.  I'm not sure if this is what the creator of YT originally intended of his site, but either way, this is extremely creative.

Video Production

The art of video production need not be explained about how much creativity is required.  I want to talk about some past projects I have had and a current project a couple of friends and me just started working on.  One main element that comes to my mind first is influences.  In any piece of work whether it be art, music, or video, one can recognize prior works that have influenced the newer work.  I'll analyze my works for example.  I am a huge Bam Margera fan; if you haven't heard of him, he's a professional skateboarder who has produced many videos and television shows throughout his career.  Certain elements he uses while making videos I find really cool.  He tends to get really "artsy," for lack of a better word, in his projects like videotaping the sky through the sunset over a course of a few hours, then in his video playing it in super-fast motion to make the scene look really cool.  He adds a lot of silent skateboarding with music in side-segments to side track the viewer in the middle of the plot of a story.  In my past videos I have videotaped traffic from the top of a garage tower over the course of an hour and played it in super-fast motion just like this.  I would add distortions to the color scheme and what-not as well to add extra "artsiness,"  and instead of adding skateboarding schemes I would add some of our free running scenes, which can be viewed in the last blog post.  I find certain influences to help give me the push I need to create new and cool aspects to add to my videos.  This is just one example of creativity in video production.