How To Create VFX That Could Blow Your Mind Away
5 Brainstorming Techniques Every Motion Designer Should Know
If you have suffered from blank screen syndrome, here are 5 brainstorming techniques to combat creative block.
Creative block? It has happened to all of us who work on this “professional creativity” thing.
I wish we always had the freshness of mind, motivation and inspiration that we need to bring large doses of creativity to any briefing or project that falls into our hands, but we know that this is not always the case.
Have you ever felt it? That cold sweat that begins to appear on your temples, that knot in your stomach that tells you that “this time I won’t be able to” or that lack of clarity when it comes to knowing when an idea, a graphic or an animation style is the one that works best for the project…
Don’t worry, the dreaded creative block is just one more part (not a very pleasant one, though) of our work. For those moments of tension that we suffer when the deadline looms over us , there are various creative unlocking techniques that usually involve sharing ideas with more people in what is surely the best-known co-creation process: brainstorming.
Why is it positive to use creative brainstorming techniques for motion graphics projects?
Because it allows the exchange of approaches from different people and arrive at creative solutions that have been validated by different personal and professional profiles. And that, without a doubt, is a guarantee of the potential of the idea to “like” or “convince” larger audiences.
Let’s go for it!
- The “Classic” Brainstorming
There are many forms and styles of brainstorming , probably as many as motion graphics studios or advertising agencies. But in any of them an orderly process is needed, which we detail below.
Before talking about the stages of brainstorming, we must emphasize the importance of a facilitator in the meeting, whose role is not so much to decide which idea is the best, but rather to encourage the participants to bring out all those ideas that they have inside.
The 5 basic phases of a good brainstorming.
1. Heating / “Warm Up”
The brainstorming dynamism proposes a simple problem that has nothing to do with the briefing or project to be addressed. For about 10 minutes, the participants propose ideas to solve this problem and “they let go. This phase serves for people to warm up a bit, get rid of complexes, put aside nerves or insecurities and begin to create the right climate for the success of the brainstorming.
2. Approach
Next, the facilitator exposes the real topic of the meeting, exhaustively providing all the necessary information so that the participants can start throwing ideas. This is where the magic begins to emerge. And where, once minds and moods have warmed up, the real creative work begins.
3. Generation of Ideas or ideation
In this phase we must generate as many ideas and proposals as possible. It is important that ideas are not prematurely judged or delved into too deeply. Simply, we make a list as long as possible of ideas, proposals or concepts to which we will later return throughout the brainstorming process.
4. Improvement of ideas
We start from the long list of ideas from the previous point and proceed to analyze them as a team, thanks to the opinion of each of the brainstorming participants. It is time to enrich the ideas and combine them with each other until you find the proposal that shows the most potential in this selection process.
5. Evaluation
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In this last phase, the criteria are established to evaluate the ideas and decision making, those that do not meet the objectives set in the briefing or are unfeasible due to development time or cost are discarded from the “shortlist” and the decision is made. final.
2. Mind mapping technique
It is a brainstorming support technique in which we will use a representation of the ideas and proposals in the form of a tree , where the central element is the main idea, and the branches are secondary ideas or proposals that derive from the trunk or central nucleus of the proposal. .
What do mental maps provide?
Sometimes it is difficult to see the path that an idea or proposal has if we do not delve into it and analyze all its possibilities. The use of a tree diagram ( where each idea depends on a hierarchy tree-main branch-secondary branch-….-leaf) can help us evaluate the list of ideas and make decisions
How to start applying the mental mapping technique?
We must write the main theme in the center of the board and connect it on both sides with secondary elements, until we build a map/tree structure. From each branch ideas will emerge that are increasingly further away from the main problem, but also with more freedom and originality. Once the mind map is finished, it’s time to rearrange the elements and mix them to find new creative solutions for your project.
Tips for your mind map
- Mix drawings and words on the board to stimulate your brain processes and the effervescence of ideas.
- Don’t be too analytical in this process. It’s about flying a bit and not being airtight. let the ideas flow
- Have you run out of ideas? Use the trick of self- questions : ask yourself things out loud and you will see how everything flows a little more and you can continue drawing your creative treasure map.
3. Random stimulus technique
It is a technique to unlock the creative process that is also often used in brainstorming and that appears in the book “New think. The use of Lateral Thinking” by Edward de Bono. It is a very fun creative tool that is based on forcing the apparently non-existent relationship between your problem or project with a randomly chosen idea/word.
The important thing when starting this technique is to break with the classic associations of ideas (more logical and rational) trying to find unexpected combinations (a little crazy) that may not be 100% usable in the end but that may allow us to reach somewhat more ambitious creative solutions.
This is how the random stimuli technique works
- Choose a word completely at random, for example by opening a book to any page and pointing to a word with your eyes closed.
- Take note of that word and write a list of words associated with the initial term (this association is semantic) for example if “living room” appears, we could add sofa, chairs, pictures, decorator, coffee
- Try to relate your problem or project with those words. Although it is difficult, you will surely find a way. And the most positive thing is that during the process interesting approaches and stimulating ideas will appear that you can take advantage of and fit in some way with your project.
4. Role-storming
It is a brainstorming technique created by Rick Griggs whose objective is to stimulate the power of creating ideas by making the participants stop being themselves for a few hours to play a different role or character ( role playing) . In this way, if, for example, we play the role of a hitchhiker traveling the world we will multiply approaches and proposals and open new possibilities to creative debate.
According to Griggs, there are some brakes of human behavior that, to a certain extent, “limit” brainstorming
- The conservative human tendency to support the most realistic or obvious ideas.
- The anxiety that causes us that our ideas are rejected by the rest of the participants in the brainstorming.
- The dominant role that some people can exercise due to their charisma in a group meeting.
- The inability of some people to have to make creative proposals “in real time” in front of other people who can judge them.
In this sense, role storming forces the participants to put themselves in another’s shoes, freeing them from fears and insecurities.
If we want to make the technique more fun or communicative, we can choose famous people that we can even imitate or even dare to put ourselves in the shoes of one of the colleagues with whom we are brainstorming.
5. SCAMPER technique.
SCAMPER is a brainstorming technique devised by Bob Eberlee , whose name is an acronym for “Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate and Rearrange” which in Spanish means:
- Replace
- Combine
- To adapt
- Modify
- use in another way
- Remove
- Reorganize
