As part of the 2019 YIA Awards one of the guest judges, Erik Hay from Weta Workshop, presented to a room full of educators on the creative process. Erik is the Creative Strategy Director at Weta and has a background in advertising. As someone who places myself on the ‘talentless’ end of the creative spectrum is was reassuring to hear the creativity as a much a process as a talent. And as part of this process, ideation as a starting point is so important. Erik gave some examples of some bad ideas that were turned into movies, and despite have millions of dollars spent in production, they were still bad ideas….
One of the aspects that made his presentation engaging was the design of his slides. It was refreshing not to see the standard title/bullet point/image that students (and myself) are often guilty of. But it probably helps if you work for a company like Weta full of talented artists that you can get to draw your slides!
One of my key takeaways was the traits that Weta looks for in their employees. Erik explained that this came from their development as a company. Which Richard Taylor said yes to all those Lord of the Rings movies, there simply wasn’t enough people in NZ with the right skills. So Weta needed to employ people who could quickly develop those skills and so adopted the above recruitment checklist. Yet again, another example of the importance of traits/dispositions over qualifications.
Lastly, kind of a nice set of ground rules to operate with a bunch of different people (just like a classroom!). Favourite rule: Be a radiator, not a drain!
