LOCKDOWN 2020 - CREATIVITY BLOG.
During this time in Lockdown I have found the time to continue my creative journey and expand on my creaitve skills. I have already tested my editing skills with my Nature video but this time I wanted to try something differnt. Blog writing. I am not the best writier and never will be. But I wanted to try something new and test myself and try to convey to people my thoughts and experience during lockdown and hope that many of you can relate to it. Enjoy reading it below! Thank You.
Lockdown 2020 – Creativity Blog
We are now 60 plus days into Lockdown, well not total lockdown anymore as its being lifted slowly, and I have had a creative gap that I am now trying to fill with another new skill blog writing. I am not the best as writing but hoping this works out well.
As we came into lockdown back in March, I was just finding my feet, looking for my career starting job into film or tv production. Then everything came crashing down on the 24th March. When the prime minister announced we were going into total lockdown. I lost my positivity and passion to continue my process into finding a job, because my mind kept telling me no, no one can offer you a job right now, and you have nothing to do right now so just chill. I am sure that we can all relate to that, that we all thought that we should just relax and enjoy this time off, after all this time off may never happen again or at least in these circumstances hopefully. In the first few weeks everything was confusing I think we all just did not quite understand what we were being told and I myself could not quite believe it.
Before lockdown and before covid-19, I was accepted onto another Create Jobs programme, this was called meet-a-mentor, it was a programme designed to pair young creatives with a professional from their desired industry to help give advice and mentor them into finding a job or helping develop their personal profile or assisting them with job applications, it offers young creatives an opportunity to expand their contacts and learn new skills and techniques. We had two session in person but then we went onto zoom monthly meetings.
The zoom sessions were great, over 40 people joined every month, and it allowed me and the rest of the course to keep in contact whilst still developing ourselves, whilst receiving inspirational talks from industry experts. It allowed me to re-focus and say to myself that I can be productive and that I can find a job whilst in Lockdown.
As we went into lockdown and I found myself at a creative block, then after the first zoom meet-a-mentor session, I spoke to my mentor Kran and she told me to use this time wisely, to be productive and learn new skills and be active and test myself, but it's okay to take a break every now and then from job hunting as you can perhaps lose yourself in a hole of looking for the wrong thing because that’s all your thinking about.
After my conversations I started production on a new creative project, a new short film about Nature, and filming the smaller appreciations of Nature whilst out and about. This time allowed me to reflect and learn new techniques and develop my editing skills using adobe premiere pro. I learnt how to change the background colour of images and enhance my colour grading techniques and work with mix media by incorporating still images with moving images and quotations.
A part of being on the meet-a-mentor course we had to set ourselves some goals. During my time in Lockdown I found the time to edit together a new cover letter to use for applications, I worked on various versions of my CV and used this time to effectively do things that would help my professional career. Due the circumstances I couldn’t complete all my goals during the rest of the course, but it's okay as things take time and people understand with the current climate, as long as you are on the right path and there is some creativity flowing at some points it’s okay.
One thing I have learnt in this lockdown is to be yourself and accept who you are. I know it’s hard when you see everyone else on social media, showcasing their work-outs or their banana bread making skills, I know how hard it can be to focus, especially when all you want to do is relax and have everything in working order. But it's okay to feel like you're not okay, it okay to speak out and ask for help, at the end of the day we all don’t really know what is going on and were all going through the same thing and its new to us all.
As we start to come out of lockdown, I find myself at a creative block again and have not been so productive and creative. I understand that things will never go back to normal and we have to adapt but I believe that I should still use the rest of my time to try new things and learn, one of those new things is writing this blog.
I wanted to do another creative project but agreed that doing another film might be too much and considering I have a lot of moving and visual projects already I wanted to do something different. So here I am not sure if this is making any sense to anyone, writing my first ever blog if that’s what you can call this, thinking to myself that it might not be the last as I am really enjoying letting my thoughts flow onto the page and hope that you are reading this feeling that you can relate to it or not, it’s okay to not be able to relate but to understand the struggles people and especially young creatives have had during this lockdown.
I hope that this Lockdown has helped develop creatives and adapt a new way of working and that this current climate improves soon and we can all meet again.