Has your creative team faced adversity, struggled to land a huge pitch, failed in “crunch-time,” or wrestled with bouncing back from a quick cultural shift?  Consider exploring the connections between artistry and competitive sports to build a fresh mindset of creative fortitude.  Introduce the concept of “art-letics.”
 
Artistic pursuits share many similarities with competitive sports.  First, in a broad sense, both professions share parallel trajectories.  Most athletes specialize in a particular sport or position – i.e. basketball, baseball, soccer, just as artists may specialize in a genre of artistic expression – i.e. painter, writer, actor.   Second, athletics and arts are both “top-heavy,” meaning a very small percentage of the best in-the-field, earn the majority of the income.  Finally, just as athletes compete for starting positions, artists seek to “win” jobs.  An open “try-out” for a team , for example, is comparable to an “open-call” to audition for a play or television series, in that both scenarios involve a competition for a role that fits the needs of a team.  So, in a general sense, athletics and artistry have analogous worlds. 
 
Also, there are numerous cultural phrases and vernacular that merge the arts with sports -  “poetry in motion,” for instance, is a phrase to describe someone that moves with effortless grace and beauty.  “The stage is set,” is often used to describe the beginning moments of a competition with high-stakes.  A baseball pitcher can “paint the corner” of the plate with a pitch, while the catcher can “frame” a strike for the pitcher.  A football player might “dance” in the end zone or “tip-toe” along the out-of-bounds line.  Teams can “draw up plays” in a competition and so on and so on…In short, the semantic connections between the arts and athletics are abundant and they permeate the culture.
 
Not surprisingly, since these two fields have so many similarities, they can work in tandem.  Most notably, sports have inherently narrative themes that lend themselves to stories - i.e. the underdog, redemption, against-all-odds, unity.  A season, for instance, has a built-in arch, with adversity, conflict, success and failure.  All of these narrative themes pair nicely with the art of storytelling.  Consequently, having an awareness of the innate similarities between competitive sports and artistic expression yields creative advantages for agencies, production houses and artists. 
 
If we operate from the notion that the careers are analogous, that the verbiage blends the two together and that the narrative themes are comparable, then it is conceivable that the mindset of the artist and the athlete are similar.  Just as the greatest athletes possess mental strength - playing their sport with passion, practicing relentlessly, persevering through adversity, and patiently working a process towards championships, mental toughness can easily be applied to the pursuit of creativity – perseverance, passion, practice, patience and implementing strategies towards winning business.  Finding a weakness in an opponent is the equivalent to discovering an opportunity in the marketplace.  Winning new business with a successful creative pitch is the same as hoisting a banner from a championship. Therefore, in addition to the numerous cultural parallels between arts and athletics, the mindset is similar. 
 
In reality, it is not arts or athletics, rather arts AND athletics – “art-letics.”  Culturally, semantically and psychologically, there are countless parallels between the two fields, and by acknowledging the similarities, fresh approaches can be applied within a creative team.  Applying mental fortitude with the comprehensive understanding of storytelling, creates a well-rounded artistic mind that is resilient, disciplined and sharp, allowing for adaptability in the fast-paced field of advertising.  Advertising agencies and production houses that recognize the symmetry in the two fields can gain a competitive edge by welcoming athletics into their art, creating a foundation for artistic excellence.

Did you read this far?  Thank you.  Let's connect in the real world and continue this conversation.  - CB

If you are a person career-minded creative individual that struggles with finding time to relax, perhaps the best way to improve your career is to do the opposite of completing that next to-do… instead, take a quick pause and recalibrate with a hobby that will help you relax AND benefit your career.  As strange as it sounds, learning a musical instrument improves cognitive function, relieves stress, increases creativity and, in my opinion, allows you to approach your creative projects from a three-dimensional view.
 
As a content creator, copywriter, producer, voiceover talent, director, or video editor that is responsible for generating content at-scale, playing an instrument and understanding the intricacies of music composition will compliment your storytelling. The parallels between music and narrative pieces are endless.  Songs, for example, follow the narrative structure, and I have mentioned before that a music-bed is the ultimate directing hack.  Furthermore, an understanding of instrumentation will allow you to dial-in emotional tone faster.  For instance, knowing a major chord will typically sound more “cheerful” than the “melancholy” of a minor chord might enable you to find a music-bed quickly or help you to communicate tone to the voiceover talent and client.  Other nuances appear as well: for instance, a string instrument generally pairs well with a spec pushing “inspiration, “ and acoustic guitar plays well with “warmth.”  In short, a grasp of instrumentation opens the door for more dynamic storytelling because creatives have a more holistic understanding of the pieces being crafted.
 
Picking up an instrument will undoubtedly benefit your creative career by dramatically enhancing the skill of script interpretation.  To begin, music has its own language that parallels storytelling.  For instance, a music piece will begin with an intro and conclude with a resolve just as a narrative piece offers an exposition and resolve.  Similarly, a song can crescendo while a story climaxes.  Additionally, many musical words such as staccato, tempo, beat, and accent all correspond with directing voiceover talent, interpreting copy and scoring a script.  Even the word “score” has a shared meaning!  And there is the obvious parallel between voiceover director and conductor…
 
Understanding music and playing an instrument also makes you a master of pacing and tone, thus creating a “good-ear.”  The nuances of a music bed and understanding how a voiceover compliments a piece can improve directing abilities, and learning an instrument enhances this skill.  For example, when working with pitch, a director that comprehends musicality can offer the best places to lift words and create emotional pivots at the appropriate times.  Similarly, as a voiceover talent with a “good-ear,” directing notes are interpreted more clearly (even if the client is struggling to "speak creative"), because the subtleties of one’s performance are more easily identified and adjusted, since tone has been practiced with an instrument. 
 
 In short, music and instrumentation offer many ancillary benefits to a career minded creative individual.  By learning a musical instrument, creative minds will benefit from the numerous parallels between storytelling and music.  Theses parallels – song-structure, the language of music and listening – will create more enriched content from creators, copywriters, directors and video editors.  Simply put, the skill-set that is acquired from playing an instrument is transferable to other creative endeavors building a more holistic understanding of each part of the creative process. 
 
Did you make it to this paragraph?  If you have reached this point, I would like to thank you for taking time to read this post.  I take pride in crafting unique perspectives on the advertising industry that cut through the clutter.  As the world moves faster, I am striving to build connections.  True connections take TIME and the ability to slow down when appropriate.  Clearly, we are on the same page since you scrolled through an article that took more than :06.  I would like to collaborate with you.  So please reach out with a “hello,” and let’s make great content together. I would appreciate you commenting or sharing this post if you found it insightful.  I can be reached at [email protected].  High-fives from a fellow creative-mind and voiceover artist.  ChrisBurnettVoiceActor.com

Let's have a brief chat about the economics of content in today's market, because it is no secret that the "global attention span is narrowing." As the attention span of a viewer decreases, the volume of content has to increase so you still have the opportunity to catch the viewer. So how can a video production company, advertising agency, or producer shoot more content while maintaining quality?

Shoot in bulk with your Advertising Agency or Video Production Team

A simple way to gather more content quickly is to shoot the material all at once with the video production team. 
So when developing concepts, strive for concepts that play well together as a series versus stand-alone ideas. 
Then, rather than set up lights, camera, and sound for one concept, you will have a series of fleshed-out ideas that can be shot on the same day/time, maximizing your time and resources. You can then make the finals slightly different through wardrobe changes, different camera angles and lighting adjustments. Release each completed video separately on different days and boom – your advertising agency, video team and producer, look like a content-generating production machine.

Crowd-Source Concepts from your Target Audience

Content creation and idea generation can be difficult when developing ideas on a daily basis for video production. In order to navigate this challenge, reach out to your own audience for inspiration. Ask them what they would like to learn, see and consume from your advertising agency, video production team or creatives, so you can free up your creative energy for client projects and new business pitches. By simply listening and maintaining a dialogue with your target audience, you will discover content needs while simultaneously growing engagement of your followers.

Allow your Video Production Team to Edit On-The-Go

If your advertising agency is striving for quantity, a desk or stationary location will inevitably provide a barrier for your video production team, since you are required to be at that location to edit.  As an alternative to spending many late evenings editing small clips for clients and social media on Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, download a basic editing app on your mobile phone. Quick, simple edits with royalty-free splashes of music dramatically increase editing speed because you can do it from any location - appointments, Zoom meetings, basically anywhere you find yourself waiting with downtime.  By keeping your footage in the cloud and utilizing an editing app, you can take your editing with you on-the-go. This will increase the speed of completed videos from your creative production team.

Are you looking for quality content AND lightning speed? Reach out and let's chat about your creative needs.  Audio, voiceovers, copywriting, editing, idea generation - do you have a creative idea that needs fleshed out? I can be reached at [email protected] or 213.761.8212. ChrisBurnettVoiceActor.com