Just create! Lessons from SXSW Sydney
Attending SXSW Sydney is a whirlwind of excitement and fun. As a creative in the screen, music, gaming, and tech sectors, it’s an exhilarating and joyful experience meeting like-minded people keen to create and network. Attendees engage in fun activities, attend insightful talks, and enjoy many “happy hours” and freebies.
What immediately stands out about SXSW is how many industry professionals are brought out for this event. For people who are early in their career and creative endeavours, it can be quite an intimidating experience to put themselves out there, gain confidence talking about their work, and learn more about their sector.
A big takeaway from SXSW Sydney is the importance of pursuing the simple act of creating. Creativity has a purity and authenticity to it. An individual’s creative work reflects their values, inspirations, interests and unique point of view.
Ultimately, creative work is an insight into the author, a distillation of their worldview, or an exposure of their thoughts. As a result, festivals and events such as SXSW are a celebration of how varied the minds of creatives are and how exciting it is to be a part of creative industries.
A particularly inspiring Screen talk I attended, The Creative Entrepreneur: Career Sustainability = Crossover Collaboration, was an insightful discussion on maintaining a stable creative career and gaining skills across various roles in your chosen sector.
The talk was led by Denise Erikson (Head of Training for Screen Careers), Hannah Riley (Writer/ Director) and Fraser Corfield (Artistic Director for Australian Theatre for Young People).
A key takeaway was the importance of doing and completing creative projects. According to Ms Erikson, many young creatives starting in the film industry often “talk the talk” but have no work to show in the area they’re interested in. For example, an aspiring screenwriter with no written scripts or library of projects. In other words, how could anyone become a singer/songwriter without singing and songwriting?
Seemingly, this is more common than everyone cares to admit. Ms Erikson related her experiences with film school graduates, asking them about the films they want to write and direct, with very few having anything tangible to show.
While her statement may sound harsh, there’s potentially a sad reality to some of it. For some creatives, they themselves are the reason they don’t have a library of projects to show.
Self-criticism, overthinking, and even the tendency to cringe at one’s work can sometimes be the biggest villains of the creative process. In other words, the artist’s own self-criticism can stop themselves from creating art in the first place.
Great art, such as music and film, is often made by a creative (or collection of artists) displaying an unfiltered and mostly uncompromised body of work.
Creative work can potentially be very revealing to the author, which may prove difficult for some to expose themselves and refuse to allow the opinions of others to intrude on their minds
Writer and director Hannah Riley quoted the commonly-used phrase, “don’t kill that part of you that is cringe, kill the part of you that cringes.” The ability to express a creative idea without the self-critical part of the brain that forces it to feel something is “not good enough” can prove challenging for young creatives. Ms Riley said the easiest way to get over this is to “just write the shitty first draft”.
In his keynote talk, musician and former TAFE NSW student The Kid Laroi spoke about how important this was for his career, noting the importance of “not having too many cooks in the kitchen” and staying true to himself. Laroi and his accompanying producers on stage discussed working through self-doubt and insecurity by “trusting your own opinion on your music is really cool”. The simplicity of this advice appears somewhat obvious but is nevertheless crucial.
In the session For News Media, Digital Transformation Isn’t a Process – It’s a State writer Lucy Blakiston from the news site Shit You Should Care About emphasised how important it was starting to write for her personal blog and develop her voice. Ms Blakiston noted that even though she was worried no one would be reading or care what she was saying, she did it anyway. SYSCA now has 3.3 million followers on Instagram. Go figure.
It’s not the absence of fear these three individuals attain. The common thread is that they did the work, put in the effort, and stayed true to themselves as best they could.
What is crucial here is that they didn’t get in their way. I can only imagine how true that was for countless more creatives on the stages at SXSW Sydney this year. For young creatives starting in their respective fields the ability to create for the sake of creating is foundational for their development and growth.
If young artists take anything away from this year’s SXSW Sydney, I hope it’s the inspiration to be themselves and to just make the thing they want to make, and perhaps next year, they’ll be up on that stage.
