What is creativity? How de we define creativity? Where does creativity come from? How philosophical is the notion of creativity? Is everyone’s ‘creativity’ different? Or is it an ill conceived, simplified term that is used to describe a very specific series of neuronal & bodily reactions to certain stimuli? These are all the questions I’ve been thinking (and googling, and youtubing) since beginning this Capturing Creativity studio* and I have found some answers or maybe I’ve just found more questions: Creativity is generally defined as the ability to make new things, or come up with new ideas, it’s an ability to think outside the box, to see unique solutions and employ them in inventive ways. In this sense creativity is not always utilised when being ‘creative’, as to be creative is simply defined as the ability to make or produce something. However I guess that depends on your definition of creative, how different, unique, special, once off, un-influenced does something have to be, to be classified as creative? This is where creativity get’s tricky. It’s all well and good to be like oh this is what creativity is, so it’s easy to investigate it, but what if you don’t define that as being creative, maybe that was just following a formula, a somewhat inspired formula, but maybe it is just a formula. Creativity to most people seems to be a random mix of once off genius combined with solid skill and hard work and for us humans these percentages are unique to us. Maybe creativity to you is 90% unique idea, 5% skill and 5% hard work. Maybe creativity to you is 40% unique idea, 50% skill and 10% hard work. Maybe for you creativity doesn’t have to involve any hard work at all. For me when it comes to creativity I’m most interested in that unique idea portion; where does that unique idea come from? Is it simply random? Is it a gift from the gods? Is our unique idea just a product of a lot of subconscious effort, only made aware to us in the sense of a ‘random’ idea? Have we been influenced by something, processed it... Question: Why was the narrator thinking about creativity? Options:  A. Because there was a definition of creativity  B. Because it was not tricky  C. not enough information  D. Because it was undefined  === The correct answer is
D

We had a light bulb that stopped working and when a new bulb was placed it wouldn’t light up. We eventually had a technician from John Moore come out to fix this problem. He was nice enough and took the time to explain to me why it had stopped working and how he would fix this. After about 30 minutes he had completed this and then offered as a free service to inspect the electrical parts of the house. He went out back to the fuse box to look and then after inspection offered to show me what he had found. It was mid to late afternoon in the back yard and that’s when the sun is aiming straight to my back yard. I should mention we live in Texas. He went over ever single fuse and wire that we had and explained about the piping and all the other things that go with it and that what we have isn’t what is recommended anymore. Our house was about 9 years old at the time. We were back there for more than 90 minutes. I started getting very restless because I wanted to work on dinner, the sun was blazing hot and I needed to do many other things. It was coming up on 5 o’clock. He then went to his truck to write up an estimate. After 20 minutes or so he comes back and tells me it will be about $10,000 to fix our fuse box system. So what started out for changing a light bulb was going to end up costing 10K. We did later get it looked at by someone else that is qualified in this field,m who was there working on some other project and he said there was nothing wrong with what we had. Question: After the end of the story, the author probably: Options:  A. not enough information  B. Asked the second qualified individual from the end of the story to fix the fuse instead for a lower price  C. Did not worry at all about the alleged problem with the fuse  D. Called the electrician back to fix the fuse for a lower price  === The correct answer is
C

*Question*
Think outside the box, whilst inside the box (studio): As this studio is about working with constraints, I thought i’d google ‘constraints in filmmaking’ and see what comes up. One of the first links was to a journal article by Heidi Philipsen entitled ‘Constraints in Film Making Processes Offer an Exercise to the Imagination’. Interestingly enough the first sentence of her article states: “I would like filmmakers interested in thinking “outside the box” to recognize that they can benefit from being placed “inside a box.” I wonder if Paul had contemplated this whilst choosing the name for this studio. Throughout her article Philipsen challenges the notion that creativity is an intangible innate quality, existing within the mind of one source, but rather creativity arises from a multitude of sources. Alike all things shared she suggests that creativity is easier to enhance by changing environmental conditions, rather than encouraging people to ‘think more creatively’. Perceiving creativity in this way allows you to see it as an organisationally influenced phenomenon, rather than a psychological  and individual phenomenon. Which enables you to have more control over creativity and to encourage creativity once being aware of how it can be environmentally enhanced. As Csikzentmihalyi (1996) states “a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work”. Constraints, as Philipsen suggests is one such way to manipulate the environment to enhance creativity. Students who attended The Film School in Denmark, who were forced into working with constraints for their  projects eventually considered constraints to be both useful and inspirational. Such constraints included: making a scene with a specific theme, within a specific deadline and with other specific conditions concerning the use of camera, sound, actors etc. Students stated that these constraints ultimately made them feel secure, inspired and focused and... Question: Why was Fred bored? Options:  A. because John ate all the cake  B. not enough information  C. because John got married  D. because the event was lengthy  === The correct answer is
**Answer**

D