Indian Creative Forum | Safe Transactions & Successful Engagement
Most of us are exposed to creative opportunities from an early age, be it joining a dance class, or signing up for an art workshop. A smaller chunk among this group even joins a professional art school, whereas a majority of us pursue art as a hobby that more often than not turns into a life-long passion. It is intriguing to see students earning in college itself by working/freelancing in their creative domain.
When it comes to engaging in creative work, age is never a bar. Personally, I started making these really cool videos (I like to think of them as cool!) right from my college days, and was taking up commercial projects as well. Coming from a background in Economics, and switching to a career in the comparatively not-so-stable creative field was a personal choice, as I had not experienced any trouble till then. It was only after college, when I was working with fellow creatives on commercial projects, that I realized it is not easy to make a living in this domain. My professional peers who had the fortune of coming from prestigious art schools did not possess a substantial practical know-how of running a business; it was expected of us to learn on the go.
There exists an entire culture of learning through mistakes, which even I participated in; I quickly realised the trickiness of negotiating with a client, especially for an advance. I went through numerous payment defaults for projects where my delivery matched the brief perfectly. Arguably the creative domain does suffer from an ambiguity on the nature of brief, it is not easy to out in words what the client needs are. At other times, my transactions fell apart since I did not have paperwork outlining the project’s scope, timeline, and deliverables, among other requisites in place.
It was easy to gather that most fellow creatives were faced with similar problems, and to validate the same, I conducted a campaign with my team. We touched over a million creative professionals, and many of them wrote to us, narrating tales from their experience.
Having heard these stories, the important question was, what next? We had the option of letting the campaign simmer out, or take from it to develop a solution. Constant brainstorming with creatives, lawyers and entrepreneurs resulted in the chalking out of Indian Creative Forum (ICF). ICF took shape as an attempt to provide a platform for safe transactions and successful engagements between creatives and businesses. Right from providing a resource center for discovering industry standards and business basics, to interacting with the community and having experts answer queries on the forum, incorporated within ICF is a battery of measures that eliminate many of the frequently recurring problems in a creative transaction; And at the same time, it substitutes as a personal business manager, taking care of the paperwork that very few enjoy doing on their own (at least I don’t!). ICF is my contribution to the creative community, by which I hope my peers enter into a transaction powerfully and engage successfully!
To know more about our mission, share your experience, or just a little chat, write to me at rahul@aawproductions.com.
