My creativity mantra is simply “Begin.” I ignore the looming unknowns and  problems, for the moment, and just start with the easy stuff, like getting the lyrics in the video timeline or filming the obvious shots.  My English brother-in-law called it “Getting amongst it” and I’ve learned to live and create by those wise words.

I just finished my video for “Heavy Metal Moose.” At the outset, I had a custom-made moose puppet, thanks to an artist friend, and some mountains and pine trees made from construction paper from another video. I set up the mountains and made enough extra trees to create a “forest” and started filming. On film, I had some lovely panning shots of a construction paper boreal forest. We’re rolling.

The first verse hints about a “beast on the loose” but doesn’t reveal its identity until the last line, so my first problem was providing peeks of a shadowy figure slipping through the trees. I realized that if I kept his face hidden, I could simply slide my moose puppet between the foreground trees and the background trees. I just had to avoid bumping into the trees or the illusion was shattered comically.

Skip forward several days of this kind of stuff and I was wondering what to do for the lines, “if you meet this lovesick moose/ leave him alone, don’t get juiced!” I figured squishing an orange was not just kid-safe but prime 3^rd grade comedy so down to the kitchen I went, thinking maybe a kitchen mallet would work. To my delight, I realized that a potato masher is shaped remarkably like a moose hoof. I covered a couple mashers with a pair of brown socks, made two hooves out of construction paper and soon I was giggling with delight as I filmed juice oozing out of a tangerine as I squashed it with my “moose hoof.”

Sometimes a friend’s imagination gets me unstuck. I told a workout buddy that I was perplexed by the lines “A thousand pounds of angry moose / makes a really rough masseuse.” He said he imagined a massage bed with Mr. Bill (character from a ‘70s Saturday Night Live skit—I’m dating myself here) getting squished. That’s a BIT strong for a children’s song but I liked the image of a massage table.

I had a white polishing cloth nearby and I wrapped it around a couple of yoga blocks—yep, that passed for a massage table! I laid my squishy snake puppet (of course I have a squishy snake puppet) on the table and used the aforementioned “masher moose hooves” to give a classic Swedish massage to a miserable looking snake. Can you believe this is my job?  

Quite often, the things that are my thorniest puzzles end up being the best parts of a project. For me, art comes from the creativity required to navigate these challenges. I, myself, can hardly believe this is my job. And I can’t believe my luck.