Creativity and Genre

 

    When going on a new venture in a subject fruitful with options, it can be difficult to determine what you want to do. In my case, being a magazine for my portfolio, I initially had trouble deciding whether I wanted to do a film sequence or a magazine. When I had decided that, it was up to the genre I was going to do. Naturally, I had chosen to go with what I enjoy, mainly a mix of history, war, and fiction based on those two. Because I had chosen history and war, I did not think, initially, that I had enough room for creativity, which I ended up finding that I did. As Dr. Ron Beghetto explains in a recent interview of his (September 2020) that in summary, creativity can be constrained originality but can meet goals in different ways. Dr. Beghetto is an internationally recognized expert on creative thought and action in educational settings. Duncan Wardle says something similar to Dr. Beghetto in saying that one needs to start out at the basics and work to enhance the experience and reframe the challenge. Duncan Wardle is the former Head of Innovation & Creativity at Disney and founder of iD8 & innov8, a Design Thinking consultancy. From this, the importance of creativity is that even constrained by certain factors, especially in the case of history, one may still have room for exploration.  

When I was researching for my project, I had wanted to combine both elements of film and magazine while combining the realism of war and the grandeur of history, trying to achieve balance. The magazine and film that I researched reflected this. The film was a Turkish production called Conquest: 1453 set around the siege of Constantinople, directed by Faruk Aksoy. This film, while depicting the Byzantines and the Ottomans as two grand armies (an exaggeration), the costumes of the characters as well as the plot of the film was generally accurate. To help counter the exaggeration of a film with the realism of a Magazine, specifically, a magazine from TIME about the 75^th anniversary of D-Day. The editor of this magazine was Douglas Brinkley, a nonfiction historian. Their creativity is displayed using grandeur and simplicity in the respective film and magazine. What I would do different is that I would gather visuals from the television show that the figure I want to talk about is based on rather than real life photographs as this individual is from the 13^th century.

  

My vision for a portfolio project incorporates history and nonfiction. My partner and I want to center this portfolio around a figure relatively unknown to my schoolmates. Because I have taken up an interest within the history of the Turks within the las year or two, I want to focus this portfolio on a magazine in which it is centered around the 13^th century Chieftain Ertugrul Ghazi, the father of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman the first. Even though our inspiration is from a television series, we plan on making the subject of our magazine based on historical facts from the drama while incorporating elements of realism. While we may not take steps to make our product creative, our intention is to portray this figure of Turkish history in a uniquely realistic and historically accurate sense, unlike today in which the intention of the product is Neo Ottomanism and Nationalism but realism less so.