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A content creator, video editor, or any person carrying creativity work has experienced creative block at some point in their career. What is a creative block? It refers to a situation where you lose your ability to create more work or become sluggish in your processes. Creative block isn’t caused by commitments or lack of skills but demoralization, which lasts for some days, weeks, or months depending on an individual. Creative block can be caused by fear of imperfection, stress or unhappiness, incubating ideas, many ideas, and other related factors. There are several ways of getting out of this block, and here are the top seven suited for a video editor.
Take a Break
Taking a break from creative work can significantly help overcome the block. If you find yourself in this situation of not working anymore or concentrating on your writing or video editing, take a break, and focus on relaxing your mind. In any creative work, four processes are involved: preparing for the work, incubation, illumination, and verifying your work. Most creativity happens during preparation, where you need to come up with ideas on carrying out your tasks. You can take a break by sleeping, reading books and magazines, renovating your editing studio, forcing yourself to procrastinate, watch movies, surf the web, and much more.
Talk a walk away from work
When stuck on ideas, most people take a walk to refresh their minds, which leads to a flow of points. Taking a walk helps rejuvenate your mind, refresh your ideas, and make your body active for the task. You can decide to walk on public roads, on parks near you, or do some hiking for some hours to get over the block. According to research done, a person’s creativity increases immensely by over 60% when they take a walk or participate in other physical activities. You can even go up and downstairs, move around the building, or have some runs on the treadmill.
Change Your Scenery
Changing your workplace can do wonders in curbing the block. Other than sitting in your office all day every day, you can decide to work at the library, café, a shared workplace, or a quiet park where you can continue doing your creative work. If good on a budget, you can take some time off to vacation to help reduce the block and improve your thinking. Changing workplaces help change our thinking for the better.
Use ‘Back to One’ Strategy
In most video productions, directors always recommend getting back to one, which means resetting everything for a new shot. You can use this strategy in your video editing software by setting it ready for the next editing task before taking a break. This idea means closing down all unnecessary tabs, music players, browsing tabs, and other items in your editing machine and activating the next task to edit on the screen. After taking a break, you only need to jump in straight to the task without wasting time on other things.
Eliminate Distractions
In most cases, it’s distractions that make individuals go slow on their creativity or suffer creative blocks. Too many distractions, if not controlled, leads to destroying one’s creative work. Many editors get distracted by checking their social media accounts or browsing on the web for things unrelated to what they are doing. To help avoid editors’ block, free your mind from any form of distractions, including having opened browsers, social media, and other alerts.
Play around with the Footage
You don’t have to work on the whole video at once. At times, the mind gets tired when editing more extensive videos that might take several hours to edit. You can try segmenting your video into smaller sections and work with a section at a time and have some relieving break between the sections. Besides segmenting the videos, you can focus on time blocks, where you set editing time into phases. Scientists recommend working for 52 minutes and resting for another 17 minutes before picking the next task.
Start with Specific Tasks
Not all videos are the same; you will find some parts harder than the rest. Starting with easy tasks can help bring up the editing mood to tackle even the more challenging tasks. However, this goes with the urgency of the tasks and preferences. Some editors prefer working with difficult tasks with a fresh mind then tackle the easier ones later. Whatever you choose, ensure it improves your output and eliminates the creative block.
The above list is just a tip of the many more you can use to overcome the creative block. Ensure whatever you do maximizes your efforts, boosts your energy, improves your focus, and goes with your mental stamina.
