It is just a different type of creativity to be brief. To make smaller things. To make shorter things.
And if you want to make a ‘longer’ thing - then it’s just how you add to it, expand it, or join them together afterwards.
Not only is there is not only nothing wrong with making shorter ‘pieces’ or ideas - it is a pre-requisite…..It IS the process.
And making LOTS of them IS the process for making lots of good ones.
And it’s the most fun bit.
Bohemian Rhapsody was literally 3 separate songs shoved together. A Day in The Life was 2. All songs have a ‘core’ that
Is built upon later. Or joined together with others.
If you have more of those bits. You have more good bits. And you have more good ‘finished things’.
And technologically we are in a time when brevity, in many contexts, is valued and can be leaned into more easily than ever.
People (yourself included) have made space in their lives in for 15 second of something, that can touch them, seemingly ‘in addition’ to the longer periods.
And anyway, art has ALWAYS been driven by technology. An LP could hold 45 mins or music. So, yeah, that’s an album.
A CD holds 74 mins. So 1990s albums got much longer. And so on, cloud data storage in Siberia.
So It always has been about presentational context and cutting your cloth.
The real creativity and talent come in making ‘the thing’ as close as to what you wanted to make anyway - and getting it out in the world - without using ‘the technology’ as an excuse to do nothing just because it isn’t EXACTLY how you conceived it might be.
Even this piece of writing (which you are only reading on IG because, unlike other weeks, it deliberately fits in Instagram’s 2200 character limit) I hope is an example of being able to make, more, shorter things, that have their own style to them, and can stand presentationally and contextually on their own as a kernel or taster of a bigger ‘full’ idea - and are also there to be developed or combined with other ideas in the future.
And, it bears repeating….the idea is also the most fun bit.
Stu (Lux Lisbon)