The Broadest Definition of Creativity Needs a Broader Definition of Craft

This year both of us had the opportunity to judge and attend Ciclope awards and festival. Toby was judging Short films, Seb Music Videos. Ciclope has always been the self-professed home of craft, so the production community rally for it, but we were some of the only agency folk there, surprising given agencies live or die by our craft too. What really struck us both this year - in the work we judged, the conversations we had, and the talks we attended - is how much that craft is evolving, broadening and cross-pollinating.
Yes there are some steadfastly traditional pieces, made more authentic by their commitment to analogue craft. The Grand Prix winner Hornbach 'Jobs without drama' is a bathroom DIY job set on a theatre stage with SFX performed by a chorus.

Leigh Powell’s Volem la Pilota is a love letter to 125 years of FC Barcelona. A dream-like piece that is firmly grounded in reality - no VFX at all, shot with all natural lighting, and entirely street cast.

Elsewhere digital and traditional aesthetics are working together or borrowing from each other. It’s a strange quirk of our times that the way we as an industry evaluate the craft of “the future” is in their ability to mimic the past. It’s like a race, every new AI tool competing to recreate human imperfection.

Darren Aronofsky’s Ancestra, shot on film but with many sequences built with VEO, will make you cry but there is something so hauntingly human about it, profound subject matter aside.

At the other end of the spectrum, the powerful ‘Chains & Whips’ music video used a wild practical effect to give punctuated scenes a stretched and warped effect. Realness pretending to be fake.

In the Large Scale Storytelling talk, Richard Kenworthy from Nexus revealed that in Abba Voyage side panels either side of the main stage showed the performance back at 25 fps, versus the holograms at 50 fps, to give the impression the performance was being filmed and broadcast live, enhancing the impression of reality.

It feels symbolic of our moment of flux. Digital acting as analogue and analogue acting as digital. And that feels really exciting. Craft is moving form on either side…avoiding A.I. slop on one, and safe nostalgia on the other.

The cross-pollination is most evident in hybrid forms and mixed media. In Snoop Dogg’s ‘Last Dance with Mary Jane,’ live action collides with 2D, 3D, collage, and AI. It’s not one discipline—it’s all of them playing together. Likewise the short film ‘Heroic Dose’ - a finalist, not a winner, but Toby’s favourite pick of the category. A mock epic ayahuaska trip with a range of hallucinogenic animation styles is brought crashing down to earth through live action comedy and breaking the 4th wall. It is, quite literally, piss yourself funny.

Cross-craft thinking was everywhere. In his talk Court Williams of DE-YAN applied the language of cinema to brand experience, discussing the importance of theme, characters, sight lines and cinematography, even conflict within an experience. In “The Poetry of the Prompt,” the act of writing for an AI is the craft. The words shape worlds. The craft sits in how we talk to the machine, not just what the machine outputs.

At Anomaly we have always embraced the broadest definition of creativity. At Ciclope we saw the production community embracing an equally broad definition of craft. Expansive, curious, willing to borrow, merge, play and interplay. More agencies should go - we could learn a thing or two from them.