Making Special & The Importance Of Elevation
Aim high.
There’s something mysteriously powerful about creative flourishes and tweaks in the execution of an idea. Adding something distinct, memorable and unique to the way a piece of creative works has disproportionate effects on how successful it is. On one level, that’s easy to understand. Of course - people want to see something cool, something they’ve never seen before, they’re tired of the same old thing, etc etc.
Novelty is huge. It’s self-evident to most that to get attention you have to make something that stands out. Grabbing people’s attention in a crowded marketplace is like tapping a glass with a knife before making a toast. If all the frequency bands in the audible range are filled with chatter, rumpus and hubbub, you need to get into the empty bandwidth space. You do that by creating a new frequency in order to cut through the noise. Surprise, innovation, creating something distinct - all important, but the kinds of additions and moments of careful craft I’m talking about are something else. Something almost magical.
When I was trying to better understand the power of craft, care, elevation and artistic flourishes to capture our attention and our imagination, I came across the brilliant work of Ellen Dissanayake, who writes about the origins of the arts through an evolutionary and ethological lens.
In every case, even today, when giving artistic expression to an idea, or decorating an object, or recognizing that an idea or object is artistic, one gives it a specialness that without one’s activity it would not have. One renders it special, recognizes that it is extraordinary. This characteristic of art has been referred to by other names by other thinkers, e.g., transformation, aesthetic transposition or promotion. It is a sort of “jacking up,” a saltation or quantum leap from the quotidian reality in which life’s vital needs and activities occur, to a different order, an “aesthetic order” - Ellen Dissanayake, Art as a Human Behavior: Toward an Ethological View of Art (1980)
When we make a piece of work special, it is understood that this is something other than the everyday, something important - it’s something which should be attended to. It signals to a viewer that this is something that has been cared about and that it is inherently of worth. Over and over again, I’ve seen the power of smart & skillful people finding that visual tweak or perfect conceptual twist (or even just putting the extra hours in) reflected in huge spikes in audience retention and consequently the widest possible distribution of the video.
This isn’t “good content performs better”. This isn’t underlining the importance of “high production standards” or “premium content”, rather pointing to something rarer - going the extra mile, adding a flourish, giving the work that additional rigor or invention or intentionality or complexity. In short, elevation.
“While “special” might seem too imprecise and naively simple, or suggest mere decoration, it easily encompassed an array of what is done in making the arts that is generally different from making nonarts: embellishing, exaggerating, patterning, juxtaposing, shaping, and transforming.” - Ellen Dissanayake, The Core Of Art: Making Special (2003)
There’s a fascinating analysis she did with David Miall on The Poetics Of Babytalk. They write about how ritualized behaviours underline salience through “proto-aesthetic operations” - formalization, simplification, exaggeration, elaboration, repetition & manipulation of expectation. Think about how each of those can play a part in elevating a story, an idea, a video. Through these universal signs, on an unimaginably primal level and with measurable impact, a piece of work can define in the mind of the viewer its own relevance.
Brand Values
Russell Brand’s been on a bit of a mad one. He’s gone from 2017/18 YouTube titles like “Why Is Socialism Cool Again?” and “How Do You Find Your Higher Self?” to current ones like “WATCH FAUCI’S FACE! The Question He Feared!” and “Oh Sh*t, Hillary Admitted THIS!”. 20 of his videos in 2023 have “Holy Sh*t” or “Oh Sh*t!” as part of the title. He’s selling less nakedly exploitative messages than much of the content aimed at this market, but he’s sure playing with some dark magic. It’s fascinating to look at his current demo split.
Make of that what you will.
Links
Typically inspiring stuff from Maria Popova on Iain McGilchrist’s giant neuropsychology tome, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. His definition of attention is “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists.” Click around the archive, it’s great. / The Marginalian
Kenan Buhic’s master’s thesis on Attention as a Metric has the clearest summary of the study of attention I’ve read and I’ve read a few. If you want a primer on the subject, this is the one. / Kenan Buhic
The late 90s and early 2000s were a golden era for pop music video editing. This video from Tri.be is like a mesmerising future-enhanced 4K supernormal version of that edit style, while still very true to the spirit of the original. / YouTube
Fun bit of vitriol from Jacob Oller on Hollywood’s shift to “tech-bro economics, Wall Street-fellating “vulture capitalism” here to feast on the industry” / Paste
Go to the settings on your Spotify. Turn auto-adjust quality off. Turn quality to Very High.
“Quality is the best business plan, period” - John Lasseter