Inventive directing and getting over the concept of perfection – The UCSD Guardian

This previous month, I used to be the artistic director of a photoshoot as a advertising and marketing member of TREND magazine, UC San Diego’s student-run style journal. Though given free rein to pick any theme, I used to be strapped for concepts; all I knew was that it wanted to be good. 

For me, perfection is sort of a protecting older sibling — it needs the very best for you and goes out of its strategy to cease you from experiencing failure or rejection, which retains you from experiencing something in any respect. In my artistic ventures, perfection — my private protecting older sibling — has hindered me from pursuing new endeavors out of concern of not measuring as much as my very own inventive expectations. 

As faculty college students, it usually appears like we’re in an outcome-oriented system that rewards the ultimate consequence moderately than the method of studying. Everything about faculty life at UCSD encourages us to measure our worth by our proximity to excellence. But generally, probably the most significant experiences come once you let go of those expectations. Personally, I’ve realized that perfection is overrated, and I’ll inform you precisely why!

Just in time for this 12 months’s simultaneous Valentine’s Day and Lunar New Year weekend, I made a decision to base my photoshoot on my all-time favourite movie, “In the Mood for Love” by Wong Kar-Wai. Despite this clear image of what I wished to do, I discovered myself avoidant and immobile, afraid that my lack of expertise on this artistic enterprise would wreck the imaginative and prescient I had created in my head. 

I used to be paralyzed by perfection. It wasn’t till final month that I lastly had a working proposal, regardless of having at the least six months to plan. When the massive day lastly arrived, my thought of excellence got here crumbling down. 

It began with rush-hour site visitors that set us again 45 minutes, leaving us just one hour to park, get arrange, and take footage — solely to seek out that flash images was not allowed contained in the dimly lit bar. These setbacks, though admittedly minor, stacked up; I couldn’t get out of my very own head.  

Thankfully, I had a workforce that coaxed out my artistic path from the paralysis of perfection and confirmed me that the method of adaptation is simply as, if no more, stunning. 

The minimal lighting labored completely in our favor, extra precisely reflecting Wong’s moody movie coloring. The urgency of the time crunch spilled into the images’ tone, and the adrenaline fueled the fashions’ portrayals of candid feelings.

Slowly, I noticed how my obsession with perfection was overtaken by one thing higher — not the idyllic, good nonetheless picture I had imagined, however a wonderful journey. Remember: It takes expertise to study one thing new. Sometimes, that features a little encounter with failure.

Yes, artistic path is about pursuing your imaginative and prescient, however extra importantly, it’s about working with real-life situations as you go. My greatest triumph on this mission was studying easy methods to belief my artistic perception. Knowing that it’s all the time inside me makes me assured that any setbacks can’t truly set me again. 

The success of the inventive product is greatest measured by how actually it represents you. In the tip, the pictures got here out higher than I had ever hoped for. They had been human — not the image of perfection, however a mirror of myself as an artist. Had I allowed my obsession over perfection to dictate the course of this mission, I wouldn’t have made it my very own. 

Perfection is overrated as a result of it has its method of stopping you from taking up a possibility for concern of failing. In this life, you’ll come throughout a wide range of alternatives, and with them, there will probably be a number of issues which might be out of your management.

Approach change with curiosity — as a substitute of, “I don’t think I can do this,” assume, “How can I learn to do this?” If you learn to fail, and fail quick, you’ll be able to focus extra on what you realized and how one can apply it to the current expertise and different tasks sooner or later. 

Whatever your alternatives could also be, don’t let the stress of being good cease you from taking them. Apply to be in that artwork present, even in case you assume you don’t have a number of work to show. Perform at that gig — who cares in case you’re scheduled for the gradual hours? Abandon that pursuit of perfection for the prize of experiencing life.