WAYS TO GET IDEAS

2: IMMERSE

I disagree with Ditkoff’s suggestion about immersion. This is a valid point that he makes, but I do not believe that it is for everyone, or at least not for me. I can see the benefits for both the employee and the employers by giving workers time to work on their own projects but I don’t believe that immersion works for everyone. For instance if I am trying to write a script for a movie, I do not sit in a quiet room with a pen and stack of paper. If I  am trying to write a script I need to do other things, I need to be inspired by my surrounding. I take pieces of events and compile them together. I take song meanings, conversations with friends, bits of dreams and turn that into a script. I do believe the some people need to have complete focus and immerse themselves into a project for it to get done, but I am not one of those people. 

3: TOLERATE AMBIGUITY

I strongly agree with Ditkoff’s opinion tolerating ambiguity. If you want to accomplish something, you wont be able get it exactly right on the first attempt. No one is perfect and if you want to create something you can do it, but you have to do it wrong before you know how to do it. If you want to write a song, write a song and then work from there. Learn from your first attempt, if it did not work out the way you hoped the first time then you need to ask yourself what you need to change for the second time. I implement this idea all the time in my own life. When I am trying to write a scene or a piece of dialogue I will write it over and over again. I will have some drafts where everything is essentially the same except for a few words and I will have some where the two scenes are complete opposites. Then I look at all of drafts and figure out which one works best for what I am trying to accomplish with the story. 

10: HANG OUT WITH DIVERSE GROUPS OF PEOPLE

The other idea that Ditkoff brings up is the idea that if you want to breakthrough you have to hang out with diverse groups of people. If you work with only one group of people you can perfect your skills working in that group, but eventually you will reach a point that you can not get past. If you work with different people you will get new ideas and a new set of eyes on how something should be done which can help if it is successful or a failure. If it successful you learn about a new way of doing something that you thought could have only been done one way. If you fail you learn that the way you were doing something was more successful and you should stick with it until something else that you can try comes along. In media for instance if you only work with one group of people your projects should get better for a while until your group gets to the best of its abilities and there is no where else to go. If everyone in the group works with other groups then each person can add things like maybe we should try this because it worked for us or lets definitely not do this because it just didn’t work. 

Prompt 12:

What “failed experiment” or unexpected outcome might be interesting for you to reconsider? Who else might you invite to participate in this effort?

Over the summer my friends and I tried to make a sitcom and put it on YouTube. The production was what seemed to be a huge flop. We spent weeks writing on a script. We were all happy with the script and we all thought that we really had something here, something that could be successful. It was not successful. We never started taping anything. None of us knew what to do. We had no idea how to tape a scene or how to direct. We did not of a camera to record any scenes and we had no editing equipment to edit our nonexistent shots with. During this upcoming summer though we are going to try and actually make this “failed experiment” work. Now that I, and a few other of my friends, have some experience on how a production is suppose to go we will try and use what we learned to make this production actually work. We plan on bringing in other people we have met who are more familiar with working a camera and using audio to help us take our script and turn it into a video. We also plan on getting some new people to help us out with the script so we can get other people’s opinions on what we have so far.