The art of personalising your creative work

As the world becomes more digitised and video media tightens its grip across platforms, it’s easier than ever to become a jack of all trades.

With a phone in hand and a video in mind, you can be an all-in-one videographer, writer, editor, sound mixer, actor and narrator. But with so many skills to work on, how do you get better at them, balance them, and make your work feel like your own?

For answers, I spoke with the king of multifaceted-ness at The Attention Seeker (TAS): Ollie Madsen. He's a videographer and editor who also acts, writes and directs his own short films. We chatted about what it takes to not only bring great videos and films to life, but to actualise a vision and make content that’s indisputably yours.

Sup Ollie! When you work on projects, either with clients or in your own personal work, do you closely follow a brief? Or do you usually have a vision?

With the work at TAS, it's a mixture of blending what creative and strategy teams have outlined and trying to work to their briefs, while also bringing my style and how I work to it. So it's a bit of a balancing game, I guess. And then on my own personal stuff, it's freer running, just a lot of my own ideas bleeding out into projects.

How do you bring your personal experiences and interests into your work?

Everything you do and have done influences the way that you create things. You could take a short brief to any of the videographers here at TAS and we'd all likely create something quite drastically different based on how we visualise things. Some of us see things step by step, while, for me personally, I always visualise an end goal and work backwards to make that happen. Everything I've ever done before and experienced elsewhere influences how I view and hope to achieve that end goal in a project.

Either personally or for clients, have you noticed patterns in what videos perform best?

Comedy is really hard to pull off, but when you do pull it off correctly, I find it works the best. I just love the way comedic content speaks to people or tells a strong human truth. Or it can completely, like, flip the expectation of what someone thinks they’re about to watch.

Do you struggle to come up with ideas? Or is that something that’s free-flowing for you?

At TAS, I don't have to come up with ideas, so in a sense it's pretty free-flowing. It’s like building Lego: I get instructions and have to make the project. With my own stuff, I try to write at least a page every day. It doesn't have to be continuous or have a beginning, middle and end of a story. It can just be something random. Some things work and some things don't. But the more stuff you have on the page, the more you can start to understand what does and what doesn't work.

Do you have any advice you'd give to someone who wants to get more involved in videography and editing?

Engage yourself in as much content as possible. I always get asked how I know so much about film and cameras, and it's purely because I'm just interested in the topic. Every day I'm watching YouTube videos about new cameras or camera tutorials, even cameras I don't own or ever expect to own. I'm just interested in how things work in this world, and so it's easy for me to watch, like a 30-minute educational video. Find ways of making the education not feel like you're having to sit down and do the work.

How can someone find their own voice and start understanding how they want to put themselves into their work?

It's just watching a lot of different stuff, finding what resonates with you, and working out how you can avoid replicating it, but adopt elements of it and find your own voice in it. So for example, right now I’m hugely inspired by Key & Peele and their skits.

What I take from them is this idea of very realistic situations that everyone's found themselves in, then heightening them with some really absurd elements. And that's sort of what I write now. I have a short film that's about a family arguing over a monopoly game, but I elevated it by giving it a noir thriller vibe. That’s what really inspires me at the moment, and I'm working on finding my voice in that.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter