Perfection is Overrated

I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I've always felt like my instinct when I'm creating something is that I have to make it perfect. Everything needs to go exactly as planned and look or sound flawless, because that's what will give you the best result, right?

Well, not always. Something that I've been starting to experiment with is having my artistic projects not work out perfectly, not having them be the flawless works of art we're used to. You've heard the phrase, "It's our imperfections that make us who we are"? It's the same thing with art.

Here's a good example. One of the things I love to do is use Motion, which is a visual effects application developed by Apple, to create short intros for the Harwood Podcast Network. One of my latest projects was an intro for a show called, "Sundaes with Cindy". As you may have guessed, the show is all about ice cream sundaes. The original plan was to shoot some footage of a sundae being built and then have the title of the show appear above it. However, as often happens, the shoot didn't go exactly as planned. Here's what the finished intro ended up looking like.

You probably noticed that towards the end, the sundae starts to lean waaaay over to the right. During the shoot, we were scrambling to get the sundae built before it fell over. Less than a second after we put the cherry on top, the entire thing fell apart. Needless to say, we were all pretty disappointed, myself included. We had been hoping for a beautiful, perfect ice cream sundae for the intro. But a few minutes later, it hit me: We could still try and make it look perfect, or we could make it look like it was on purpose. What if, I thought, the title zipped in from the left and knocked the sundae over?! Insanity! Crazy talk! Or was it...

A couple of hours later, I had finished the intro you see above. I don't want to brag, but you can't deny that it's hilarious! You're expecting perfection and instead you get the opposite, something that's fun, unusual and that stands out in people's minds. That's the key right there, if you saw that same intro but the sundae didn't fall over, would it stand out in your mind as much? I don't think it would.

Now am I saying that you should deliberately misspell the title of your novel, or put a splat of paint in the middle of your masterpiece? No, certainly not. I'm just suggesting that perfection in art is extremely overrated, that sometimes it's better to do something completely unexpected. Or, do what I did. Make an accident look like it was on purpose. No one will ever know! Unless you write a blog post about it... Dang!