Unlocking your world of creativity. With Mark Stinson, Copyright 2021.

Hello again friends. Welcome back to Unlocking Your World of Creativity. This is the podcast where we talk to creative experts literally all over the world about how they get inspired for their creative thinking.

How they organize their ideas and most of all how they gain the confidence and make the connections to get their work up and out into the world.

And even in the last few episodes, our around the world travels have taken us to places like San Antonio, Texas, to Bangkok, Thailand, to San Francisco and to Johannesburg, South Africa.

And we're glad today to be traveling to Amsterdam and the Netherlands to talk to our friend, Dawa Vandover. Dawa, good to be with you.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. Dawa is a writer, he's a filmmaker, a creative director, a producer, just an all around great creative. And Dawa, I guess in terms of the focus of all of those being the story, you know, at the very base of all of your work seems to be this idea of storytelling.

Maybe we could begin there and how you look at a story.

I think I think I have a bit of a specific definition of what a story is often stories seen as, yeah, it's seen as fiction, like the connotation is fiction.

The way I define story is that it's the shape hierarchy and structure of a bunch of thoughts. So to create meaning.

So basically, yeah, lots of snippets of information are coming to the census. They're like legal Lego bricks and the story is what we build out of that.

Very good. And I guess your company, Dawa works, I love the double meaning, you know, you create lots of work, but you also put the work in to really produce the creative.

I was looking at some of the work in graphic design and animation and the script writing, where do you apply so many of these different creative, I guess techniques and disciplines to your work.

What do you mean, where do I apply them? Well, I guess, you know, how do you bring together? These are different skills. So I mean, are you are you switching between them or you blending them? I guess how do you decide?

What am I going to be today?

I think my main thing that I do is research on the story that an organization wants me to want to get across and then writing a script out of that and then doing creative direction.

I am an animator by education and I've been into 3D animation to the animation, but then as time went by, I, I, yeah, I know I hire people I set up teams for projects and that allows me to actually have more space for my creativity.

Even though I don't make a lot of the images myself, which sounds what which felt counter intuitive at first, but it's really, yeah, it really works well if you want to get used to it.

And the breadth of project you've been able to work on, maybe you can describe a few of those projects.

Hi, you mentioned earlier, like I did a project called Robin for the Dutch Research Council and it's an interactive film where you are posed with four dilemmas that come out of science and in each time the path splits.

So you end up with 16 alternative endings. So we created like 90 minutes of animation for 20 minute experience and you don't see half of it.

And then I did a project for the Harvard University around around the book by Mark H. Moore creating public value and then I basically explained very briefly what public value is all about, which is a very, very thick book sort of a standard work that public administrators use in there when they at university.

Which was quite an honor and quite a challenge as well.

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