Forced artistry - Innovations from limitations.

I know it’s a somewhat cliched phrase that; Limitation breeds innovation, but it hold a lot of water. It’s a major reason special effects in movies from before the age of accessible cgi often hold up.

When you can’t just lean on a fix it in post attitude, when shots need more detailed planning because the background set is something that actually has to exist on the day, when the main monsters design actually needs to be designed before production is in full swing because it’s going to take the puppeteers and tech team a while to make it.

When you are faced with limitations like these you are forced to actually think through an idea. To pre vis shots and flesh out a storyboard, to know how you want your monster to “act”. Don’t can have the correct armatures built. You’re forced to work through multiple ideas on paper before committing because iterations are expensive.

You’re forced to think.

And if an idea seems impossible but is necessary then the real invention and exploration begins. You need moving waterfalls in the background shot featuring bigatures and a matte painting, can’t use real water due to the way it presents at scale, the solution? Pouring salt over the edges of mini cliffs, it looks like the white water spray and audiences will never notice.

You’ve got a bandstand to fill with people at a race, but crowd sims aren’t really a thing your computer can do and the cgi isn’t integrating with with practical model well anyway, plus you don’t have proper tracking data from the camera to replicate the parallax. Paint the tips of 450,000 cotton buds, stick them in a mesh and blow fans beneath them to make them move.

Now in case you’re reading either of those examples and thinking “okay those are fun solutions in a low budget arts and crafts kind of way” they’re both from the Star Wars prequels, and no one noticed until they were told about it in bts interviews.

Now I know I’ve just been talking about film here, but this applies across all arts, even if the limitation is simply your budget I am sure there are times when you’ve found it force creativity. The limits of my computing power in the past has lead me to new methods of working that are now core to my work flow. The limitations of my skill with my hands lead me to exploring typographic art to begin with.

So maybe try and set yourselves some limits, so as to explore new ways of breaking them.