It never ceases to amaze me, the Creative pissing match

The Creative Pissing Match

This is one of the most ridiculous power dances ever invented by our devolution tendencies.  The Creative Pissing Match cannot be explained, and typically cannot be corralled once it has splash its way up your leg.

I have been in several creative pissing matches and they typically occur when the boundaries of who is in control are unclear.  This is where back stabbing, bad business, jealousy and rage trudge out of the primordial ooze and takes its first breath and does its best in destroying your project and leaving you angry and resentful.   What is so stunning to me is that a pissing match is so counter to the creative process.  A positive creative process grows a solid and fully formed collaboration, where a negative creative process usually gives birth to a convoluted, dysfunctional vision, a project that falls short of what it might be, or even worse a atomically horrific, aberration.

I have had several dances like this with live action directors who have been hired to direct a combination live action and animation job (for the first time).  Case in point, I worked with an up and coming live action director from New York on a very important national spot who announced upon meeting me that his "Live Action was King" and that my animation was just window dressing and may not even be necessary, although the client and agency had specifically designed the spot to have an animated character wreaking havoc throughout the commercial.  I gently informed him that in any combination live action and animated spot, there is no real way to feature the live action and that the nature of animation itself demanded the viewers attention.  It just common sense, the typical viewer can see live action everywhere around them, if a clown jumps out of the bushes screaming, then most likely that will command attention.

He never agreed and insulted me whenever he could and actually made sure I was not invited to the post production session where the live action and the animation were to be composted.  He tried everything to minimize the animated character effect.  He even asked if they could view the spot without the character distraction.  He was an idiot nightmare.  Instead of cooperating, trusting my expertise, being open to new ideas, he chose to jump up and down in his own creative mud puddle splashing everyone with his ill advised tantrum.

Unfortunately, the mud also splashed on us as we were lumped together as the creative team with this idiot, we never worked with that agency or that client again.  Price of doing business, bad business.  Sometimes you can't save the baby without getting wet from the bath water.