Creativity doesn’t always stem from new experiences. For Senior Strategist Paul Rusheleau, looking back on past adventures serves as a creative output, but also as a form of therapy, a way to reflect on great memories from a different phase in his life.
In the first creative output of the month for 2022, Paul talks about re-discovering missed moments as he edits old scuba diving videos:
What is your personal creative output?
I love oceans, and when I learned to scuba dive when I was 30, I was quickly hooked – Especially when I had my underwater Go-Pro with me. I’ve captured a huge amount of underwater HD footage from most of my dives – and have been fortunate to visit some really cool places along the way.
So, my personal creative output is exploring, editing, and finding highlights in the undersea video footage I captured during a VERY different phase of my life (when my wife and I travelled a lot and didn’t have young kids).
What do you like about it?
When I scan the footage and re-visit dives, I like to pinpoint the cool moments, edit them a bit, and save them. I don’t need to look that hard for some highlights, like when I came face to face with a friendly sea turtle swimming by. When you’re diving there’s so much detail to see you just can’t actually take it all in. I find myself slowing down the video, pausing, and re-watching segments to look at new details. A few minutes of editing can quickly turn into hours if I’m not careful.
Nerdy Sidebar: I really like clown fish. Did you know they spend their whole life on one patch of sea anemone? Did you know that the anemone is actually a predatory animal, not a plant? And it’s poisonous to most things, but the clown fish has immunity and uses it as protection? And also, did you know that some types of clown fish will try to attack you (something 100x its size) if you come too close to its home? One dive I took led to a patch of anemone the size of a parking lot and was home to hundreds, maybe thousands of them. It’s as mind blowing revisiting the detail in that video as it was actually swimming around them.
(See videos in playlist above)
So, as I go through the footage, I’m really experiencing the dives again in new ways, curating the best moments into my library – and I also find myself planning adjustments to improve my shots for next time.
How does working on this help you in the rest of your life (Banfield work,
outside obligations, etc)?
As a parent of young kids, with a dynamic job, in a world that balloons in complexity the more you learn about it – you need things that ground you. Looking through this footage is as much a creative outlet as it is therapeutic. The footage on its own is beautiful, and I find it really engaging to interact with and manipulate it. It sends me back in time to some of the greatest adventures I’ve had, and it even keeps my mind engaged in the climate crisis we’re all facing – Our oceans really are struggling at the moment.
I’ve been showing my three year old some footage lately and this is his favorite (Turtle video). My plans are in motion to travel and dive again.