hi everyone um i'm amelia i work with evcom um and today we're doing the first of our big skillshare sessions um and so this initiative was sort of born out of a reflection on the need for community um and something that i think covered 19 has taught us as we've seen a lot of mutual aid groups spring up and let me just add um so we're very lucky today we're going to be joined by the wonderful richard holman who is going to be uh kicking off our sessions on creative inspiration uh hi richard how are you hey amelia yeah very well thanks how are you doing yeah good thank you um yeah so uh just a little bit about you to welcome you to the session um which comes from a background in advertising and design for many of the world's leading entertainment brands and now devotes himself to uh helping others have better ideas which is what he's here to to share his wisdom on today um and he he also runs workshops he's actually got some coming up this month and you can find some links to that on our website i'll post them uh with the recording of this video afterwards um and he writes articles and books speaks at events and on podcasts and so yeah welcome thank you very much for being here and thank you for inviting me this is my first um first ever instagram live uh it's only my second so we're in the first cross yeah um so yeah um you i know you're going to share with us today some of your your three top tips for great ideas and i'm very excited to hear what they are are you ready are you ready to give us tip number one i'm all set to give you tip number one yeah absolutely hello everybody uh it's very nice to uh to be here so i've got three tips today um and my first tip on the to help you in the hunt for great ideas is not to evaluate too soon so i think a really common mistake people make is that they have an idea and that they immediately jump to evaluation to try and work out whether that idea is good or bad and if you do that you arrest the creative process you stop your ideas even before they've really begun and the trick is to try and carve out enough time in your in the thinking the idea part of your creative process to just get into creative flow so there's a quite a famous study that harvest business school have done a number of times and they take care a room full of creative professionals and they give them a brief and they say to one half of the room you are going to be rewarded for the quantity of your ideas so it doesn't matter if your ideas are any good but just come up with as many as you can and then they say to the other side of the room you're going to be rewarded for the quality of your ideas so we don't need many ideas at all but just make sure they're really good and what always happens every time they repeat this study is that the side of the room that have been asked to come up with as many as possible and not worry about quality always has the best ideas so i think the um the trick is when you're working is to avoid that temptation as soon as you've had an idea to try and think is that good or bad and to just keep on going you know to to get your pencil out and just not stop until you've you've filled the page so that that would be my first tip there's a brilliant um brilliant artist who was a nun uh karita kent who's some some people watching may have heard of and she's a hugely inspirational person to me and she began as a number then got very good at art and the um the roman catholic church kicked her out because her her fame was an artist was um surpassing her fame as a nun and she had and one of the best things about her was she wrote this sort of manifesto which she called her art department rules now i know these will probably come out backwards on um instagram live but uh rule number eight is don't try to create and analyze at the same time they're different processes so that's my tip number one that is a fantastic tip um yeah and and clearly one that across the ages has been resonating um and and can you give us an example of sort of how you might put that into practice when you know when you're actually doing it um yeah how would you yeah so um i would one thing you can do is just divide the time you have between when you get the brief to when you need to propose a solution into two and you say for the first half of this time however long that time may be whether it's two months two weeks or just two hours i'm not going to worry about the outcome at all i'm just gonna relax and let myself explore the problem and completely take the heat off and then halfway through the process or two thirds if you're feeling confident that's when you flip and you go right okay i'm going to look at everything i've got and i'm going to be ruthless now so begin carefree and ruthless sounds quite freeing in a way i think it is because um you know the the enemies of creativity of fear and pressure and self-doubt and actually the create we we're beginning to understand more about how our brains work and the rational part of our brain the evaluative part is in the prefrontal cortex but creativity happens elsewhere you know so it's kind of two different mental processes so that would be my first tip fantastic what's your second my second tip i will just look down the notes here stuck to the radiator um it is to um is to begin with the worst idea at least this kind of follows on from the vibe of what i was saying before but um when particularly in a commercial context you know when you're when you work for an agency or something there's a lot of pressure on you to come up with a great idea we all want to have a great idea a you know an award-winning idea that's going to be hugely effective and that creates pressure and pressure is no good for creativity so a really nice trick can be to say right i'm gonna ask myself what is the worst possible idea i can come up with for this brief what's the absolute most [ __ ] solution and that is a really freeing thing to do because it immediately makes you laugh you know it's quite good in a brainstorm situation it's quite funny and daft and so it relaxes you and then the second thing that's quite interesting is it can cast you off into an unexpected direction you know because you'll you'll get where the worst idea is and nobody else would go there and and what i've often found is that if you if you start with that you can actually find in your terrible idea the sort of the dna of something really exciting and original so so begin with with the worst idea would be um would be my tip fantastic yeah i really like that um and could you give us an example of when when that might have been done to with great success or not yeah well um there are there are quite a few examples but one of my favorite was um there was a an american advertising team whose names were john noble and roy grace i think and they worked on the volkswagen account in the 60s and they used this technique they'd worked on this account for a long time they were kind of bored of making the same old commercial so they said what's the worst possible scenario we can come up with for selling a car and they came up with a funeral they thought nobody's gonna put nobody's gonna sell a car with a funeral and so they smashed these two two things together and as often happens when you smash two contradictory things together you get a really fresh approach so after this video if you if you look up um roy grace john noble vw ad 1966 funeral some of those terms people will be take a look at it for themselves i will definitely check that out thank you um yeah such a wonderful idea to bring together two things you would never expect and as you say takes you in a direction a usual process might might never go yeah it's really good to say as well when you when you're uh working on an idea with somebody else you know a good sort of brainstorm technique nice great thank you all right we're on to our final tip of the of the session yes sure so and my final tip is is maybe the most controversial of the three which is um steel but don't be a cannibal it's got a code to that so um yeah this this this sort of idea of stealing and theft comes up a lot in in um when we think about the creative process uh picasso most famously said good artist copy great artist deal and i think the thing about that statement is that if you copy something you imitate it and you end up with just the sort of pale facsimile of the original ideal concept or object but if you steal something that literally means you take it and make it your own so i i think there's a good way to steal and a bad way to steal and the way you work out which you're doing is to think about whether you've stolen something from a category that isn't your own from outside your own genre and that's the trick because if you steal ideas from within your own genre that to me is a kind of cannibalism you know and cannibalism never ends well but there are countless instances of some of our most original thinkers and writers and artists and musicians looking at work in a different genre and reinventing it in their own genre and making it their own so there's um there's a really again a film that people could check out after the video is um is on vimeo and and it's by a guy called vugar efendi and it would be helpful now if i could remember the title of the film but i can't i think if you search his name vugar offended it's it's um man it's gone but um in this film what he does is he he takes great paintings and he puts them side by side from scenes in movies that they've inspired so you can see how how great directors have deliberately lifted um an aesthetic or a sort of mise-en-scene from a painting and included it in their own movies so it is all right to steal but um but just make sure you do it in there in in the right way there's a nice clip of steve jobs talking about this and and he talks about um how apple they were shameless about stealing is what he said but but he qualifies that and said they stole from computer science and zoology and poetry and all these different things some people might argue that they they stole some ideas from within computer science as well but uh you know i'm not sure what the legal sort of roles are on instagram live so step away from that so i think those those that would be my third tip yeah um that's fantastic and and is that can you give us an example of something that you maybe have stolen recently in the name of a good idea um good question yeah um so one of the projects that i've done that i'm most proud of was um was an ident for studio canal so when you see a studio canal movie there is a there is a sort of animation beginning of every movie and i i did this in collaboration with the design studio dblg and a major artwork that inspired our approach was um was one by cornelia parker the british artist and what she'd done was uh she had a work called cold dark matter which was a garden shed that had been exploded and then sort of all the bits of shrapnel and pieces were hung in the gallery space and there's a big light bulb in the middle and what we ended up doing for the ident was to to hang an installation of glass panels a bit like cornelia parker had hung her shed and to shine light through them and the idea was that you create this sort of timeless cinema ident and cinema is all about light passing through through lenses and that so but it was it was quite um it was that that artwork was it was a major sort of stepping off point for us to get to our idea and while the two look quite different i think you can see the the parallels between them and that's on my that's on my website which is richard holman.com fantastic yes everyone should definitely check it out lots of interesting resources on there um well thank you so much that was super super interesting and some some really great tips which i will be stealing in an ethical way for my own creative work you're very welcome so yeah thank you so much um and yes this was the first of our of our skills share sessions we got another one today at 3 p.m with illustrator luciano so please do join us uh online then and yeah thank you richard and thank you for everyone who joined and this will be on the website later today as well for anyone who's missed it so yeah thank you thanks amelia thanks everyone bye-bye take care