The Ken Burns

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Many of us, especially in the creative field, are familiar with the Ken Burns effect. But he's more than a master manipulator of old-timey footage.

Ken Burns is one of the most prolific documentarians of our time. He has been responsible for telling some of the greatest and most all-encompassing stories of America’s pastimes, such as the story of "Baseball," "Jazz," and "The Civil War."

Burns’s documentaries are often several hours long and broken up into multiple parts, and often include some of the rarest audio and visual footage ever recorded. We’re talking turn of the century and early 20th century when there where there were few cameras available to the public (and people truly "lived in the moment").

However, Burns has an interesting strategy. Whereas most people would try to linearly map out the story they want to tell, Burns thinks of a story as one long edit.

He puts everything in first, in order to truly figure the story, then selects what parts are absolutely necessary before continuing on and putting it all together.

“When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics... but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.” - Ken Burns

At first glance, this is a very simple concept to apply to our own creativity.

If you're writing, throw it all onto the page (aka a spit draft) and try to whittle down from there.

If you're a painter, you can always paint over.

Even if you're an actor, you can always over-act and be told to bring your performance down a notch.

In fact, Ken Burns method seems more fun to create that way.

But let's think about the Ken Burns strategy in terms of our everyday…

Whereas we’re constantly trying to put the cart before the horse, there are things in the cart we don’t need to bring along in the first place.

What if we were to ‘edit’ our own lives?

If we were trying to tell our own story, and adapt it into a movie or documentary, what scenes would be absolutely necessary?

How would you want to craft the journey you’ve been on so far, and more importantly, where do you see the story going?

The exciting thing about this way of viewing your life is that you can place yourself in a larger context, against the backdrop of where you came from, your friends and family and the critics (the "interviews"), and the life choices that led you here.

Then, you can determine what parts of yourself no longer serve you.

As you think back on it, there’s suddenly going to be so much that comes to mind. You are, in fact, part of a much larger story.

And yet, there is so much yet to be explored, so much yet to be written.

-EKS