A Film Class Funk Saved By Creative Brainstorming

I love any excuse to brainstorm but when I engage in it with other neuro spicy people it can get extra wild and exciting. 

Unchained thinkers have incredible powers to pull what appear to be random things into cohesive focus. Brainstorming feels like putting on Red Riding Hood’s cloak and wandering the vast woods to grandma’s house through portals to entire other realities.  Like, who even cares about getting to grandma’s house when the traveling is so amazing?!? 

I had a really fun one recently that I’m still thinking about. 

My daughter is in a film class and called me in a funk about an assignment that required making a short film with the following instructions:

must be entirely exterior shots, contain zero dialogue, and in addition to whatever other creative choices must also somehow incorporate Beyoncé, a tennis racket, strawberries, purple (the color) and three specific individuals - all masc presenting people - from the drama school. 

I was in the middle of my own assigned adulting but for this opportunity to engage in brainstorming around creative storytelling I shut the computer with glee!  So many possibilities!  So many directions! 

We started with a space western, moved from there to a discussion about Dadaism, Exquisite Corpse as a tool, and about David Lynch’s storytelling techniques before we ended up circling around the retelling of Greek/Roman mythology and then just a general theme of fables being used for social control.  The short film idea we landed on reframes the Odyssey’s sirens and Mexican folk “bogeyman” La Llorona to address gender based behavior stereotyping, considers motivations behind repairing loss or feeling whole, and hopefully pushes at the viewers’ perception of thoughtlessly accepted or normalized behaviors AND it weaves in all the required elements of the assignment.  Done! 

Then I went back to tasking like a CHAMPION, thoroughly recharged from this mental ping pong exercise, creative juices underscoring and fueling everything more than any energy bar or quad espresso possibly could.