They call me Creative Director.
The title is still strange.
Creativity doesn't take direction particularly well. It arrives late, hides when there is a budget, turns up in the shower and tends to leave the room just as someone opens a presentation called FINAL_FINAL_v7.
I don't only direct people, either.
Sometimes I direct a film. Or a photograph, a sentence, a room, a launch, or the precise way a bottle needs to catch the light so that it appears to contain something more important than liquid.
Underneath all of that, there is another job.
Directing attention.
On a production, someone has to decide where the eye goes. Which face carries the emotion. Which object receives the promise. What stays in shadow and which part of the world simply doesn't make it into the frame.
That is creative direction to me: reducing a world until it can travel.
A company arrives with years of decisions, products, ambitions, problems and people. In the end, we might have thirty seconds. So we choose.
There is the craft. There is the responsibility, too.
A reduction can bring clarity or mutilate the thing it is trying to explain. From inside the process, those two outcomes can look surprisingly similar.
An excellent image can make a complicated idea arrive clearly. It can also leave a person carrying a meaning that never entirely belonged to them.
There is no rule that settles this before we look.
Directing means answering for the direction an image takes once it leaves our hands.
The creative can say they made a piece. The director has to know where they pushed it.