37 FramesThe Myth of the “Creative Spark”
People love the idea of creativity as lightning in a bottle. A flash of inspiration. A moment of magic. And sure, sometimes it feels like that. But the truth? Most of storytelling… whether in photography, film, or planning… isn’t magic at all.
It’s muscle memory.
It’s the laps up and down the pool. The long runs before the race. The hours of practice no one sees. Creativity isn’t about waiting for lightning. It’s about showing up in the dark, every single day, until your instincts know what to do before your brain catches up.
What Muscle Memory Looks Like When Planning a Wedding
It’s not coincidence when the vows unfold beneath a break in the clouds, or when the dance floor opens just as the night begins to hum. It’s the rhythm of practice, the repetition of timelines laid out again and again until they become second nature.
Headsets echo with quiet direction, locations are memorized like verses, and every step of the day is choreographed… yet always ready for improvisation. We move with instinct, shifting the order of things without ever breaking the flow.
Hundreds of celebrations. Thousands of hours of planning. Every adjustment, every rehearsal, shaping the ability to know what’s next before it happens. That’s what makes a wedding feel effortless. Because beneath the beauty, the muscle memory carries everything forward.
What Muscle Memory Looks Like Behind a Camera
For us, it’s not luck when we catch the breath before vows, the father’s tears mid-speech, or the split second when cherry blossoms fall just as a couple laughs. It’s years of repetition. Of witnessing authentic moments, understanding the why, and practicing until we absolutely never miss.
It’s hours of editing, refining, and re-editing. Hundreds of thousands of frames. Most unseen… building the instinct to anticipate the next one.
The Olympic Mindset
We sometimes joke that this job is like training for the Olympics… but of course, we’d never compare ourselves to the real Olympians in our family who know what it truly means to perform on the world stage. Sports and creativity live in such different arenas, yet there’s one thing they share: the discipline of showing up, repetition, training, and always being ready for the big moments.
For us, it’s not pushing bodies through the pain barrier (except perhaps on a three-day wedding weekend, when we discover muscles we didn’t know we had). It’s carrying the pressure of once-in-a-lifetime days. The weight of knowing that every couple deserves us at peak performance. No excuses. No sick days. Every time we pick up the cameras, or the timeline and headset, we have to be ready.
Our medals aren’t gold or silver. They’re tears, embraces, and moments that never come again. You don’t become a storyteller by accident, or by talent alone. You get there through obsession, through training your eye, refining your timing, and learning to read people. Up and down the pool. Lap after lap.
Not for glory. Not for competition. But for the quiet triumph of alignment. When light, emotion, and meaning converge, and you’ve captured something that will last forever.
Repetition Creates Freedom
Here’s the paradox: discipline is what sets you free.
When you’ve done something enough times… read the light, anticipated a moment, adjusted your exposure in seconds… you free yourself from thinking about the technical. And that’s when storytelling becomes instinct. That’s when you stop worrying about settings and start seeing.
What We Teach Our Team (and Ourselves)
- Shoot Relentlessly. Don’t wait for perfect conditions. Practice in bad light, rain, chaos… because that’s what weddings often look like.
- Review Ruthlessly. Don’t just admire your best shots. Study the ones that failed. That’s where the learning lives.
- Edit Again. The first pass is never the best pass. Refinement builds instinct.
- Stay Curious. Complacency is the enemy of flow. Keep experimenting, even when you know what works.
A Real Story: The Desert and the Wind
When we filmed The Empty Quarter… our Nikon-winning short in the UAE desert… it wasn’t born from magic. (Although those landscapes are beyond insane…). It was born from years of training our eyes to see stillness, to frame silence, to find meaning where nothing seemed to happen.
That instinct didn’t arrive overnight. It arrived after decades of telling love stories, building the muscle memory to notice what others miss.
Why This Matters for Aspiring Creatives
If you’re starting out, don’t wait for inspiration. Don’t wait for your “style” to magically appear. Shoot. Edit. Fail. Repeat. Over and over. That grind is where your voice will emerge.
And one day, you’ll find yourself capturing a moment so fleeting it feels like magic. But it won’t be magic. It’ll be muscle memory.
Final Reflection
Storytelling isn’t a trick. It isn’t luck. It isn’t lightning. It’s discipline, repetition, and the willingness to keep going when no one’s watching.
It’s swimming laps in the dark until one day, you realize you’ve been moving through stories with ease all along. That’s when the work feels effortless. That’s when people call it “magic.”
But you’ll know better.
(And thanks to Kai Taylor for letting us use a training image as the cover photo… Currently swimming at the Australian Short Course National Championships and about to head off to the USA for the Swimming World Cup next week!! Keeping everyone inspired!)
📋 Planning | 📸 Photography | 🎥 Film by @37frames | Edited with the 37 Frames @imagen.ai profile (The Modern Classic)
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