Emerge Interactive

Emerge had the opportunity to partner and contribute to another local event, the Portland Creative Conference. If you’ve been in the Pacific N.W. for the past decade or so you might very well be aware of this endearing conference aka ‘CRE8CON’. 

There are many folks and organizations involved in putting this event on annually and the ticket and raffle proceeds go to supporting arts education in the state of Oregon for grades K-12. After a brief hiatus (seven years), Steve Gehlen, the event chairman and crew are bringing it back – in full force. He came knocking and we happily obliged with a commitment to do a mobile conference site for this year and be prepared and queued up for something fun & delightful next year. 

The event kicked off with this intro video produced by Funnelbox Production Studios. 

The format and atmosphere for this creative conference is much like TEDx. If you attended TEDxPortland, you’ll know what I mean. One big difference was that most of the CRE8CON speakers had 1-hour for their presentation and most did an excellent job sharing with us mementos from their creative thinking and processes.
 
The speakers ranged from film, advertising and communications, food, music and radio industries all to ‘explore and celebrate’ the creative process.  

Here are some goodies: 

Rob Legato – He channeled Martin Scorsese to share something from his experiences to talk about when Legato worked on ‘Key to Reserva’ an attempt to document and preserve a movie that was never made by Alfred Hitchcock. Yes, you read it right, ‘the movie that was never made’. 

Watch the trailer, you won't be disappointed. Full English version!

The actual short film on Google has the audio removed due to copyright. 

Brynn Bardacke – A quote of her’s I liked, ‘To change is difficult. Not to change is fatal.” I concur. One of her shares also included a story from her TBWA/Chiat/Day days working on the Apple account where she received an email from yours truly, Mr. Jobs, containing five words. 

‘Shit copy. Can’t approve.’ –Steve

Jelly Helm - He spoke about how he starts his creative process by asking the question of, ‘What is the deep story?’ And how do you tell that deep story? Picture a very old, tall and wise tree with deep roots. 

And I am quite looking forward to the new NBC tv show starting up, Grimm, as in the Brothers Grimm that is being filmed here in Portland with screenwriting by Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt. 

My takeaways, rather reminders are that the creative process that feeds and drives creativity in all of us never stops.  Inspiration and lessons are had from your peers, environment, competition, your state of mind, state of the economy and experiences both good and bad. Failure can be great. Make it comfortable. Embrace change. Love what you do. 

Until next year CRE8CON! We’re already thinking of the possibilities. 

Surprise performance by The Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers.