084. My plan for iterative creativity

What is the MVP cycle for creative projects?

I’ve been thinking about this diagram about how to develop minimum viable products (MVPs) in the tech world.

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At a startup, the goal is to provide value to the user and get feedback at each stage, rather than building piecemeal functionality until the very last step.

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I’ve been thinking about how I might apply this model to prototype creative projects with increasing scope. In my case, the goal at each stage is to learn new things about the creative process and assess what I enjoyed/didn’t enjoy about the experience.

The good news is I’ve already been making progress in the first stages!

1. Skateboard

I see this as just getting back to putting pen to paper. Some experiments I conducted:

Drawing the same thing everyday to reduce paradox of choice

@heykzhai#dog #art #gouache #underpainting #dream #starrynight

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@heykzhai#dog #art #goauche

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Creating storyboards based off of professional work:

@heykzhai#animation #storyboard #kungfupanda

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@heykzhai#art #anime #animation #animatic #storyboard #spacedandy #surf #surfing

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@heykzhai#art #animation #animatic #storyboard #pixar #toystory #pixartoystory

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Learnings

• Played around with TikTok and got some sense of the upload process and the algorithm

  • Editing on mobile is cool from a technical perspective and lowers the barrier to entry, but it gets tedious. Probably easier to upload video to desktop and edit from there.

• Storyboarding

  • Gained more appreciation for the cinematography of animated films

  • Started to get a sense of how to do pacing between the panels of a storyboard

  • Learned to reduce clutter in a frame to maintain focus on the action

  • Practiced drawing different character designs and styles

2. Scooter

I consider the scooter stage to involve branching out into more original work and starting to add storytelling elements.

Fan art

@heykzhai#art #painting #goauche #underpainting #ashorthike #nature #bird #chill

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4-panel original comic:

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Kevin Zhai (81/100 on substack) @heykzhai

“never had a chance” - a watercolor comic by me!

Learnings

• Both projects built directly on my gouache learnings in the skateboard phase. Nice!

• These projects were definitely more time-intensive than the skateboards but also more rewarding.

  • So what’s my sweet spot for complexity vs satisfaction?

• Fan art gets good engagement

• Comics get good engagement

  • My handwriting is really bad (but I already knew that)

What’s next?

There are still skateboards I can work on to broaden my creative surface area.

• Voice-acting

• More in-depth referencing of professional work

  • e.g. copy a Naruto fight scene frame-by-frame

  • Adding more elements like color and sound design

There are scooters I can work on to incorporate more story elements that complement each other.

• Spec scripts (how many pages?)

• Character designs (how detailed?)

• Environment designs

Combining them could lead to the next step: a bicycle.

• Children’s book with original text and illustrations

• Storyboard for an original story

  • Just remembered I did an animatic in college. Has ~150 frames.

After that, what does a motorcycle look like?

• One-shot original comic book story

• A 5-minute animated short, like a CalArts or Gobelins senior capstone

How about a car?

• Long-form comic book saga

• …a feature film? Is there nothing between a short and feature film??

It’s cool to see the different projects I could do laid out in a structure like this. Makes each individual piece feel less daunting/risky. I think my next step from here is figuring out how much time I can allocate to each project/experiment.

Any thoughts on the different stages and what you’d want to see me do next? Please let me know!

1. The metaphor isn’t perfect for tech because you don’t actually want to be redesigning from scratch at every stage. Maybe this is closer (just not as cute):

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2. Also here on Substack:

069. “never had a chance”