As someone managing a team of creatives, whether it’s in an advertising agency or a post-production company, you need to know how to work with such people as they have their own special traits. These people are mostly right-brained which results in a brain that is visual, random, emotional, and somewhat impulsive. While some of these traits might seem dangerous for a project, it’s exactly what makes your project excel if you know how to deal with them. So let’s dive into some tips that can help you make a productive army of creatives who can create wonderful videos.
Let Ideas Fly
Creativity is bound by choices. Although the sentence looks a bit paradoxical, what we can learn from it is that a straight way, strictly dictated to the creator, will not end up well when we’re dealing with a creative product. But letting the creativity fly freely has the downside of getting far from the main mission of the project, so the solution is to allow different concepts and ideas to grow freely. Create an atmosphere that allows them to look at things from different perspectives. Let them see each project, video style, scene, location, and everything involved in your video project, in many different ways. And this leads you to the next step.
Brainstorm With Them
When you develop a cognitive model in which people get used to having multiple ideas on a single subject, what you should do regarding that, is to choose the closest one to the project’s goal and let it proceed. Well, to do that, the best way is to talk to them and do lots of brainstorming sessions in which they explain the gist of their concepts. Whether you’re making the plans for filming or determining the video editing style, it’s important to have a pattern that matches everything and create a certain style. After hearing their ideas and full explanations, you can choose the one that suits the most and let others go. And don’t worry, creators, love all their ideas and mostly have no strict preference.
Set Them Free
So far you’ve tried to not dictate anything to the creative member(s) of your team and let their mind go around everything they can imagine. This manner is also a good one in terms of physical aspects of collaboration like presence and work schedule. There is a fact that creatives are more creative when they are free to move about when thinking. There’s also another characteristic that says they need to create a special mood to be able to create. So summing that up tells us that they might not be happy with working in an office. Although designing a colorful, evocative workspace will help them feel more comfortable, there are many times that they need a walk or a visit to a particular place that matches the style of the project. What you can do in such situations, is to have an online video workflow that comes with a platform like Postpace, to enable them to work from anywhere and follow the process at any time. Such platforms have also other major benefits like cloud storage to eliminate the need for hard drives, a useful task management section to keep track of the process, and the possibility to review and comment on a video, frame by frame. And this is what you should do in the next step of working with your creative team.
Be With Them in a Video Review and Collaboration Circle
We know that a creative person’s mind can go off the board sometimes as their mind jumps between possibilities. So it’s important to review their work carefully for two reasons. First, they should feel that you care about what they’ve created, and understand all the creative details they’ve placed in the video. Second, you need to make sure that the work is as close as you thought, to the project’s mission. So here you can use the mentioned video team collaboration platform to review the video in every frame of it, and maybe have some suggestions that turn the good into great. (BTW, online collaboration is what we have to do, due to this new normal made by the pandemic so think about it.)
Develop A Style
Right after finishing every project and see how successful it became, another opportunity arises to help you and the creative team to develop better collaboration by creating a style guide that’s somehow proven in your previous projects. Having style guides can help you and the team be on the same page and have consistency in your videos. Remember that the style guide should at most be, half of the creative part, and the other half of it should change project by project accordingly. That’s especially true in creative works because it should have room for the creator to wander and if everything is stable and pre-designed, they’ll get bored.
So in general, when you’re working with a group of creative people, you should let them be creative and do their magic but at the same time, guide their work in a direction that serves the project the best. Good luck.
