Leaving room for the magic
Earlier this year I watched a documentary called ‘InnSæi - The Power of Intuition’. While I won’t go into too much detail about the film itself (suffice to say please watch it - it’s on Netflix I believe) it really struck a chord with me, and especially as a ‘creative’ person, inspired me to think a lot more about intuition.
Intuition can be defined as ‘the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning’.
Some of us call it listening to our gut, but I think intuition is more than just listening to our gut, it’s trusting our gut.
And trust, when coupled with all the facets of our industry, can really make the difference between average work and great work.
As a voice actor, I am, more often than not, one of the last pieces of the puzzle - be it in advertising, animation, audiobooks or video games. Coming into a recording session for a TV or radio commercial with a fresh pair of ears is always fun and exciting, and one of the most humbling things to hear from the other side of the glass is “what do you think?”
While fully aware that the folk on the other side of the glass have been working on whatever we’re doing for weeks and months, and probably have a fixed set of ideas on what they want, it’s a joy to be trusted to maybe bring something new to the party - a different take on the script perhaps, a voice they hadn’t thought of, a nod here, a wink there.
So when you bear in mind that I’ve been booked for only an hour, and have had at best a two minute primer on the product and the target market, I really have to trust my gut and rely on my intuition if I’m going to give a committed response to the question “what do you think?”.
To be asked for my opinion says a lot about the trust placed in me by those who know the product and campaign far better than I do.
Sessions like this can be immensely enjoyable, and when there is that level of trust in the room, you can really feel it. There is genuine respect between the creatives, the sound engineer, the producer and the VO - and when a good script becomes a great advert, it’s magic!
Sometimes though it can feel like we’re painting by numbers or ticking boxes, and not every session turns out to be as collaborative as one may have hoped. Those sessions, while still rewarding in other ways, just don’t seem as magical, and ultimately I think the work can suffer as a result of being too bridled by data analysis and simply not trusting the combined experience and expertise of those in the room to help make something truly special.
One of the topics discussed in InnSæi is that we have become so lost in analytics in our decision making that we have forgotten to listen to our intuition, to trust our experience and creativity. When we do ‘trust’, the ability to engage with others, be they an audience or our market-place of people, is when the ability to connect is truly heightened.
Having been voicing commercials for over 30 years, it’s been interesting to watch our industry straddle the two cultures of creative and corporate as we manage expectations in this age of disruption.
Have we relinquished too much authority maybe, and in doing so reduced the odds of those magic moments?
Coming from a theatre background, I have always been encouraged to take risks, and trusting your fellow actors on stage is crucial if the audience is going to be enraptured by that fleeting moment of magic. Likewise the playwright and the director must trust their actors to do the right thing by the material and the production. So whether we’re talking about trust in theatre or advertising, fundamentally those magic, sizzling moments can only happen by accident. And accidents only happen when you let go.
In other words, by trusting ourselves and our collaborators, we leave room for the magic to happen.
