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The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production pp 403–414Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

There Is No ‘E’ in ‘Constraints’: Teaching Creativity in Higher Education Screen Production

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Abstract

This chapter explores one particular idea found to be powerful when teaching in universities. This idea is that limits or constraints foster creativity. Teaching creative writing by imposing constraints is well established in creative writing texts and courses. This chapter shifts the attention from looking at using constraints in the teaching of creative writing to using them in the field of film and video production (media arts). Initially the chapter cites several well-known creative writing exercises that use limits as a means of honing craft and enhancing creative output. Moving from creative writing to filmmaking, the chapter examines several examples from the world of international cinema: the films of Ozu and Bresson; Italian neo-realism; the Dogme 95 manifesto and related film, The Five Obstructions (1995). Finally, it looks at two case studies drawn from the author’s work teaching screen production in an Australian university to demonstrate the effectiveness of using constraints to teach both creativity and craft.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Oulipo is short for the French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ‘workshop of potential literature’.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Andrew Taylor

Authors
  1. Andrew Taylor
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Correspondence to Andrew Taylor .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Craig Batty  & Bettina Frankham  & 

  2. RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Marsha Berry

  3. Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia

    Kath Dooley

  4. University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Susan Kerrigan

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Taylor, A. (2019). There Is No ‘E’ in ‘Constraints’: Teaching Creativity in Higher Education Screen Production. In: Batty, C., Berry, M., Dooley, K., Frankham, B., Kerrigan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21744-0_31

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