There are a few opaque titles that make it up on screen, to be sure. “Gaffers”, for example, head the electrical department, and are responsible for lighting. Early films used mostly natural light, controlled by burly men holding up large tent cloths on long poles called “gaffs” — a type of boom on a sailing ship. Not the most perspicuous of terms — but a nice historical touch to add colour to the film business. Then there is the “Dolly Grip” — pleasingly explained on Internet Movie Database as “A grip that moves a dolly” — in fact, a person responsible for the platform on which the camera typically resides and is moved about on during filming.

These few exceptions aside, it is all pretty clear. The make up person does the make up, the costume designers, the costumes, the producer gets it all produced on time and budget. What the “Personal Assistant to Mr X” may do for this or that Mr X on a day to day basis is a matter for speculation in the tabloid press, but by now you’ve got the picture.

There are then, an awful lot of people involved in the making of a film, each with their own discreet skill set, area of responsibility, methods of working, and unique input into the wider film development process. But if these people do all the writing, acting, editing, dressing, making up, and production, what on earth does the Director do (except, of course, for shouting “Action” and “Cut” at opportune moments)? And what, you may well be asking yourself, does any of this have to do with digital? Why on earth is this article rattling on about the movie business, when we are interested in making websites / online widgets / virtual communities / various other interactive immersive branded digital doodads?

Let me back up a little. Digital used to be a pretty simple proposition — all you really needed was a Photoshop Guy, an HTML Guy, and “Job done” — one nice neat website. If you wanted to get really fancy, you would maybe do something in Flash — perhaps even throw a database or two somewhere into the mix. But that was pretty much that. My, how things have changed! After the post-bust market reset, digital is once again the fastest growing medium, eating more and more of a consumer’s time and dragging along the attendant advertising dollars.

Tech Geeks are an unending source of new digital doohickeys which consumers have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for – YouTube, MySpace, Blog-this, music-that. There are a lot more things people can do online, each of them more and more complex — write blogs, post photos, messenger their friends, share videos, upload content, tag, share, rip, mix, burn, etc.

Write this up as part of a short “creative brief” to hand off to the “creative team” and you were more or less done. Good clients would work with a forward-thinking media agency, where a media planner would do a similar job for ad placement. Really good clients would want the creative and the media folks to get along nicely and have a chat about what they were up to.

Great clients would want you to do some follow-up research to see how successfully the ads resonated with the audience. Pioneered by Stanley Pollit and Stephen J. King in late 1960′s London, account planning took the advertising world by storm and set the marketing communications creative process more or less in stone.

Losing the Plot
Alas, the Internet was invented and rained all over the advertising industry’s parade. Media is fragmented and fluid, communications are interactive and extended over time, and, when it comes to watching advertising, audiences now have the power to fast forward through ads on the TV, or completely block them from their browser.

“Word of mouth” has been amplified to unprecedented levels, allowing anyone to become a vociferous participant in an on-going, voluble world-wide conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of various products and services. And, of course, digital lets folks buy old things in new ways, new things in new ways, and both old and new customized just the way you want it.

The usual ad agency response to such changes is to insist that they are “media-neutral” and “idea-focused”. Of course, they say, we know that digital has an impact, we’re not living in the past! — and look! – this tag line can be put in a banner! This response is just not cutting the digital mustard anymore. Not least, because under the notion of “media-neutral” lurks the old ad paradigm of “campaign” — a message pushed in fixed media over a discrete period to people who are supposed to passively lap it up and be grateful.

In a recent Financial Times article, Alan Rutherford, Global Media Director at Unilever, noted that in the ad industry at present “there is a struggle to have traditional media and digital and content and PR all brought under one roof at the agency side.” In particular, “there is a disconnect between creative thinking and communications channel management.” His solution was to create an internal team to devise integrated campaigns, most of whom are focused on digital. Jim Stengel, Global Marketing officer at P&G, has called for the account and media planning to be merged together into one role.

Bricklin built the program for the Apple II and, with the help of friends, launched it in 1979. It propelled the Apple from being a computer hobbyists’ toy to being a much-desired, very useful financial tool for business. This success in the business market then drew the attention of IBM who was swiftly motivated to enter the PC market, which they had, until then, been ignoring. The huge difference that the PC has made to the western world cannot be underestimated. An entire industry was propelled to incredible success through the innovation of one inspired, informed, and slightly geeky individual. The incident is far from isolated. Tim Berners-Lee took an offshoot of the military-industrial complex — a worldwide computer network, with its suitably militarily-industrial title “The Internet” — and, with a few simple concepts, turned it into the accessible, polymorphous and dynamic “World Wide Web” – through which the entire globe and communicate and transact.

In roughly the time since “Star Wars” was released, the way the world works, thinks and transacts has been revolutionized by technological innovation. In that same time the film business has barely moved on from the story-telling pattern set by “Star Wars” itself — a narrative revolution created by another inspired, informed and slightly geeky individual, George Lucas. As a matter of fact, the most significant innovations in film-making during this period have been the extension of the special effects tools to the digital realm by the same sort of inspired, informed and slightly geeky individuals that are building the technology revolution in the rest of the world. For example, Photoshop, the now industry standard image processing software, was created in part by John Knoll — a special effects maestro at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.

But whilst technological innovation continues at breakneck pace, and continues to significantly impact our day to day lives, those fields traditionally called “creative” have merely ridden on the coat-tails of technical change. Art, design, film, writing and reporting have all been radically changed by technology, but none have by themselves made leap and bound alterations in the last 30 years. Trends have come and gone, and great work has been done, but it is very difficult to point to any transformative “creativity” in any of these disciplines that has not been driven in one way or another by a new form of technology. Look, for example, at two high profile executions in the last few years. One of last years biggest viral ads was the “remix” of Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain for Volkswagen. Created by DDB London, the ad was only possible because of new technologies in digital imaging and manipulation. The runaway hit of 2004, “Subservient Chicken” from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was really just a very simple interactive component tagged on to a previously planned “above the line” campaign.

Despite the title, the “creative” industries are not really as “creative” as they like to think. Technology, on the other hand, is just about the most creative medium in which anyone can work. Technologists create new ways to help people to find, buy, connect, share, inform, and excite. A software developer does not need to just tell stories — they can create new ways for people to do new and different things — new ways to access information, speak to friends, find and buy goods and services, listen to music, watch TV, read the news. The list, while certainly not endless, is very long indeed.