I got lost in the creative sauce again recently. Ad-lib time 🎬🧐

I spent years trying to prove myself through creation. Now I’m trying to create from conviction instead.

The creative space feels like a vacuum right now to me: suffocating on the one hand, ripe for being filled with stories and inspiration on the other. Objective “content” and stories are sanitized and optimized daily. Subjective stories are filtered and capitulate to the daily trends or whatever formula the algorithm or client needs. The byproduct of “Dead Internet Theory” and analytics, rather than human intuition around stories has left the building. If everything is so calculated or judged based on some arbitrary value that can’t connect to the intentionality, human impulse, or culture (regardless of if it’s abstract or concrete,) then what’s the point of making anything?

I can’t say I have the perfect answer. But I can share some thoughts and my perspective after spending years behind social media, brands, content teams, films, movies, scripts, acting, cameras, editing bays, relighting sets, everything from preproduction to post-production, I felt like a hamster on a wheel. Creating stuff for others without finding the fulfillment in the story. I was losing the rat race of creativity, making mindlessly, clinging to some ego-tied purpose that somehow always led to comparison or outcome dissatisfaction.

My favorite athlete and one of my muses, Kobe Bryant (rip to the GOAT), was surgical in his Mamba Mentality philosophy. Often misunderstood, the lesson I always go back to from him is just how much it honestly is about the overall process and journey. They journey IS the goal. The process of creation, whether it’s perfecting the most basic moves on the court to maniacal perfection so you have the deepest bag or making a hobby-tied video as well as you can to share you passion with some stranger on the other side of a screen. All of it is about creation in relation to the journey. The destination and outcome doesn’t really matter. Yeah, in the professional ecosystem we have to adhere to resource and timeline management as constraints, but why make a story or push your brands “content” if the journey of that content is judged only based on the outcome: ROI, vanity metrics, or whatever other shit is spoonfed.

Acting was the only thing that was different because it required LIVING in the moment truthfully. Every technical and creative skill stacked, self-tape submission, bombed audition, ruthless training or workshop, day on set was all about being part of something bigger than myself.

But how does any of this tie to story and being full of the conviction in a seemingly-cultureless time and world ready to not give a fuck? Have we lost the point of stories and the ideal human mode of communication to our screens and outcome chasing that we can’t make blissfully anymore?

The irony of acting and being part of the story being told, whether it was a janky social media niche and passion, fictional corporate campaign, a gritty indie slice of life short, or a Hollywood glamour level commercial…it all kinda blended together at some point. No matter what I did I was creating. Breathing what the system, expectations, KPI, and marketing experts fed.

For a while, the oxygen mask I kept using as survival coping mechanism seemed normal. Eventually, the oxygen started to feel poisonous. Maybe I need to adapt to breathing the carbon dioxide instead? I started breathing when I realized the “oxygen mask” I kept putting on was being pumped with everyone else’s interpretation, meaning, and control. What was supposed to be fulfilling, was slowly killing me creatively. How would they know what I need to breathe? Could they understand the depth and breadth of all the mediums, the throughline of the story, and the connective tissue of the human condition that actually moves us?

My dad recently reminded me that after half a lifetime in a socialist country before we moved to the States, and now half a lifetime here in this capitalist world, things aren’t so different when it’s all diluted and creative artistry is being rapidly displaced. The biggest difference from the Eastern side of the world and the Western side of the world, to me, has always felt like culture. The culture of communication, understanding, patience, empathy, the jazz and blues of day-to-day life, the cuisine, and, most of all, family culture.

When you’re a child, most often the first story you hear is from a parent or caretaker giving you their take on a bedtime story. Those stories tend to resonate most because we hear, feel, and remember them for the way they’re told. We put on our innocent veil, go wide-eyed, and soak up the moments. And there’s no right or wrong way to tell a story. Dimiter, my first real acting mentor, instilled the idea in me that it either works or it doesn’t work. A performance, a joke, a story. It’s all the same. It either resonates and moves us in some way, or it doesn’t. Here in the West, society’s been on the critical gravy train for years

The familial culture we nurture is ingrained in me and my culture because of the natural order of things. It’s the only thing that can nurture the things we find value and fulfillment in creating at the end of the day.

My creative and professional journey was always about this arbitrary excellence to prove something to myself and to please others through my creations, rather than having the balls to feel like I could let life flow from me instead of flowing through it.

Every project, commercial, movie, social video, stream, branding bs, administrative or academic endeavor, historical or geopolitical event lived through, or whatever else; the personal conflict was rooted in this need to DO. To create. Life doesn’t happen to us, it comes from us.

Constantly solving problems.

One of my mentors once said to me that problems are FOR us. They don’t happen TO us. How else would life have the catalyst to come from me to problem-solve and create something?

For many reasons, a lost or silenced voice perhaps, I rebel against the stagnant mediocrity so easily perpetuated by this world because of this compulsive need to make something. I love the meta of creation and the discovery of how I can cultivate that meta, whether personally or through collaboration. Otherwise, I often feel so dead inside.

If not for family and culture to be the bedrock of my life, how could I possibly have the wherewithal to know what really matters or ought to matter? Especially when the intent is often to create for community to share in that common or unrealized interest or perspective.

Movies and stories of all kinds, from animation to video games, from tabletop card game lore to indie films, from corporate branding to public legislation shaping, and more. Everything has a story you can derive or learn from.

I got caught up in Plato’s Apology again this morning and remembered that Socrates’ death distinguished so seamlessly what people still so easily misunderstand: basic justice and virtue in the face of everything that would make one feel far from fearless is enough to just do. To create. I create for expression and from inspiration. Without worry about the ultimate scoreboard. That’s life after all. The scoreboard starts and ends the same for everyone.

(Btw, I’m working on a short-to-feature film concept loosely inspired by this I can tease a bit here.)

Unapologetically asking questions necessary for creation is how I create.

Inspiration? Intent? How? Why? What? Conviction? Community? Craft? Culture?

All of this to say, the identity of expression through any medium hinges on identity and where that identity is molded. Creators like me often face the divine dissatisfaction of the artist because of this confusion around identity as a person and purposefulness.

As much as I love to create, reverse engineer, question, etc., I’m reminded today that the virtue of creation is a driving force inherently present in mankind’s survival.

I create because I must.

I surrender myself to the consciousness necessary to disrupt a meta I’ve learned. Then adapt my own human perspective and POV of that meta so that the next creator can have something to disrupt, originate from, critique, or be moved by.

The order and entropy of creation fill me with the questions and perspective-driven answers I need outside of any echo chamber.

I implore you to find your conviction from the things most moving and enriching your life because that’s what will remain and translate your outward expression into a feeling anyone can connect with if they humble their ego, remove the veil of arrogant outcomes, and resist the urge to be ignorant.

So, ideate I shall, create I must, for the virtue of creative expression.

By: Alexander Intchovski

For creative work and direction or collaboration, email: info@mindbeyondstudios.com