Speed is the key to unlocking creative innovation
A quick analysis on how speed in creation and distribution drives innovation.
I’ve been thinking lately about where innovation comes from and the insight that I keep coming back to has to do with speed. When we consider what precipitates new breakthroughs that expands the scope of the possible, it is usually some technological or operational breakthrough that allows something to be done faster.
A common example in history is the printing press. This invention made humanity smarter by accelerating the production of written information which expanded literacy. Another example is the invention of the assembly line. For transportation, this process innovation made the world smaller by allowing cars to be built quickly and at scale. It’s also responsible for our collective access to complex machines.
Speed is a precipitant to creative innovation as well. Think about the invention of motion picture. On the heels of many innovations that made still photography faster and more practical, inventors like Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, the lesser-known Le Prince, and others devised techniques to capture and exhibit photo sequences quickly enough to reflect motion. A century later and video is now the most popular method humans use to communicate and tell stories.
As I continued to think about speed through the lens of creativity and how that affects creative innovation, I noticed a bifurcation. The acceleration can occur in two contexts - creation and distribution. Acceleration in each context independently drives innovation, but the most disruptive innovations occur when creation and distribution accelerate together.
The creation context has to do with how fast something can be created or creatively expressed. The evolution from photography to motion photography illustrates this well. Another example in that realm is the evolution from film to digital for video. Digital capture dramatically accelerated video production in a number of areas. On set, digital capture eliminated whole processes dealing with managing film canisters and it accelerated turn around times since there was no waiting around for film to get developed.
The distribution context has to do with how fast content can be delivered. The most notable recent example is the shift to streaming media. For music, listening to any artist meant finding and downloading their music from the iTunes store. Prior to that it meant buying a CD in a physical store. Now with streaming media, you can instantly listen to just about any song ever recorded with just a few taps.
Speed affects how creativity is expressed. On the creation side, producers prefer tools and methods that speed up production timelines because of the cost savings. CG animation has a faster production timeline for animated shows because once the CG assets are created, some of the further animation workflow processes can be automated or handled by software. In addition to the cost savings, this is why a lot of popular children’s shows today are done using CG animation instead of hand drawn animation.
On the distribution side, consumers gravitate to content they can consume fastest and with the least amount of friction. This means that producers have to cater to the fastest distribution mediums. You won't notice many wide shots when watching content on YouTube. This is because most YouTube viewers watch content on their phones, where wide shots lose their visual detail and impact, making close-ups and medium shots more effective.
Speeding up the creation process can sometimes have an unexpected inverse effect. I remember when I worked on set for the short film Pseudo Man, directed by my friend Ariel Zengotita. I was the 2nd AC and we shot that film on a 16mm film camera. It was my first shoot working in the camera department on a set where the production shot on film. I was shocked by how fast and smooth it was on set compared to the digital film sets I was used to.
Because the team couldn’t instantly review what was recorded, we had to do more rehearsals before shooting and we had to trust what was captured. It made the set more disciplined, more structured, and more focused compared to digital film sets where the director and crew could review each shot, second guess themselves and do additional takes, sometimes unnecessarily.
I see a similar phenomenon working with AI generations and talking to people that are creating with AI. It’s not often that the AI can understand the complete intent so more time is spent generating and regenerating a particular image or a particular video to get the output the creator intends. Cost aside, in some cases it can feel like it would be faster to have an artist paint a picture or to do traditional production.
Yet the value of AI for creative expression comes from how it dramatically compresses creative output once the high-level creative intent is defined. There is tremendous potential in accelerated creation that can lead to innovation, but it is slowed by creatives hyper focusing on getting familiar creative output from a novel creative accelerant. Creatives must be willing to shift their thinking to unlock creative innovations.
Accelerated methods of distribution are inherently disruptive by themselves but the innovation goes much further when paired with accelerated creative expression. Live-streaming is one area where this is evident. This format is the most compelling form of entertainment media today with still-evolving growth potential. On the distribution front, the content is delivered in real time so it’s frictionless.
On the creation front, creators who live stream have to constantly come up with ways to keep the audience engaged, whether through interaction with their audience or doing something over the top or unexpected for the duration of the stream. It is the most dynamic form of video entertainment and that is part of the reason why creators like Kai Cenat are so popular with younger audiences. For them, it’s often more fun to participate in a livestream than to passively watch a movie.
A similar innovation unlock hasn’t quite made its way to narrative yet. At least, not with video based narrative mediums like movies. There was one attempt back in 2017 with the film Lost in London. The film was live broadcasted to theaters around the world as it was being shot in a single take. It was a first of its kind and a bold experiment to bridge filmmaking which is famously perfectionist and live broadcast which favors improvisation. I remember watching it in theaters and thinking to myself that they are really on to something, but 8 years on no one has attempted it again at that scale because of the technical complexity.
There is untapped potential for narrative storytelling that can realize the dynamism that can come from creating in real-time and piping that creativity through an outlet that can present it in real-time, creating a live feedback loop between story and story consumer. This speed induced innovation will come for narrative with the synthesis of accelerated creation and accelerated distribution. I don’t know exactly what it will look like but what I do know is that AI will have a role to play and the innovators will be the ones that sprint past our now-outpaced storytelling mediums to grasp the potential of speed.