Creativity is a curious thing. There are so many ways in which it can be applied. It’s one of those intangible qualities that many people believe they simply don’t have. “I can’t draw therefore I’m not creative.” “I don’t like painting so I must not be creative.”
But creativity isn’t limited to the visual arts.
While animation is a highly visual industry, there are countless challenges behind the scenes that require just as much creativity as what ends up on the screen.
Take financing, for example. If you’ve ever tried to fund a purchase or a project, you’ll know there are many ways to do it. You can:
Save up until you have the full amount. Ask friends or colleagues for support. Approach a bank or lending institution. Apply for government assistance. Seek private investors.
All of these avenues can help secure funding, but they also require creative problem-solving. What’s the repayment plan? Is there even a repayment plan or is there a trade-off, such as offering equity, shares, or recognition? Maybe the investor earns a credit as Executive Producer. Perhaps a character is modeled after them in a scene. These are creative strategies but not in the visual sense.
Time is another limited resource that demands creative thinking. If you can schedule a complex project involving multiple people, keep morale high, and meet the deadline—that’s creativity in action. Say a task takes a certain number of hours, and you have a fixed number of artists… but the timeline is tight and you don’t want to overwork anyone. How do you solve that? Drafting a plan, identifying potential bottlenecks, and balancing resources. This is logistical creativity.
Before working in animation, I used to run delivery routes in a truck. Planning the most efficient way to do the run, packing the vehicle so orders were easy to access in the correct sequence, and minimizing time wasted rummaging around, that was applied creativity too.
Visual artists are often seen as the sole keepers of creativity, but in truth, everyone has creativity in them. It just looks different from person to person.