How do creatives find their own point of view? Tom Dunlap Explains It to a Teenager

Physical media may feel increasingly rare in a digital-first world, but its ability to create something tangible and lasting is finding new relevance. 

In the latest episode of Explain It to a Teenager, Blake Richards sits down with Tom Dunlap, Chief Content Officer and Founding Partner of SuperBloom House for a conversation about physical media, creativity, and learning in the industry.

Blake Richards (BR): Who am I here with today and what do you do?

Tom Dunlap (TD): I'm Tom Dunlap. I'm the Chief Content Officer and founding partner of SuperBloom House. We are a creative and production company based out of Los Angeles and New York. We work with brands and advertising, do brand entertainment, social advertising campaigns, and I oversee all of our content creation, creative, and production.

BR: What is Superbloom House?

TD: One of the really interesting parts of our company is that we have what's called SuperBloom House Creative Collective. That is a community of over 350 creators, makers, producers, directors, showrunners, journalists, writers, influencers—people that we bring behind the camera to be part of our creative process and execute the work that we develop and make for our clients. This magazine is a celebration of that community. 

It's a large group of people, right? 350. How do you get the word out about who's in this collective? We don't publish these lists. We don't have a website, but we like to celebrate them through the work that they do and their creative passions and their expressions. And the magazine itself, we publish three times a year and every issue is a little different. We go on themes that are important to us or in culture. Right now, this is the gardening issue and being that we're here in the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, this particular issue is all about the people's creative journeys.

In the true spirit of SuperBloom and how creators bloom, the creative process is just like flowers or nature or gardening. There's ebbs and flows.There's the right amount of water, the right amount of sun, the right amount of whatever. And not every creative journey ends well. And so, this issue really explores people's creative processes both visually and through their own point of view.

BR: How does this issue show those ebbs and flows and the growth of an artist or someone doing what the people inside of this issue are doing?

TD: There's articles in here that talk about people's creative point of view–their journeys through the creative process, right? This is whether they're a filmmaker, an artist, or a photographer. We also have Ana Gasteyer of Saturday Night Live fame in there, and it's just talking—they talk a little bit about what their creative process has been like and some of the trials and tribulations. Sometimes you have got to cut off a limb, just like you got to prune a plant, and they sort of talk about how their point of view as it relates to that metaphor of nature.

BR: In an age of a lot of digital media with social media everywhere, what is the significance and importance of having something you can actually touch and feel?

TD: At SuperBloom, we actually love creating media where media doesn't exist. And in this age of digital media where everything's consumed on phones, screens, it's nice to meet people where they are in the world. We love physical media. We love creating things that live not just in the digital world, but in the physical world itself. In the art of magazines, it's kind of an old art, but it's coming back. It's like vinyl, right? The touch, the feel, the analog nature of it. Being able to feel the paper and experience the work and sit with it just creates a moment that isn't fleeting, it's tangible, and we like that. 

When you see some of the most impactful work, especially here at the Festival of Creativity, a lot of that work–especially the work that's won the last like 24 hours–has been about out of home and physical media, experiential stunts, and the printed medium. We use this not only to express our passion for that place, but also to show our clients that you can put things in the world that are real and tangible and not just digital. This is a true expression of that.

BR: How does someone join that world or this collective? How do young artists or up-and-coming editors, producers, visualists get their name seen and inside of things like this?

TD: We recruit. There's two ways that people come into our collective. One, they find us, they see what we're doing, and they reach out or their teams reach out to us. There's a lot of press that we put out in the world that gets discovered by that. Ultimately, it's my team and myself that are going down rabbit holes of content. We see somebody we like, we follow that chain down the funnel. We figure out who they are. We connect with others. It's really an act of curiosity and being a student of the industry that we're in. 

When we see something we like or read about it, we go and find it and we find those people. We engage them—and not everybody we engage gets into the collective. We want to make sure that the people that we are bringing in, we can work with, that they are collaborative, that they have the right lens that we're thinking about, that they think the way we do. And that they're willing to work the way we work, and we work the way they work, too. That they have a general passion for what we're doing and kind of see the world in the same way we do. And that's how you kind of get in.

BR: What is your advice to teenagers especially who are trying to get into really any industry?

TD: Be a student of that industry. Okay. It's one thing to say, "I want to get into music," or "I want to get into photography," "I want to get into filmmaking." I don't care what part of it is that you want to get into. Become a student of that. Be super curious. Go deep. Do your homework. Understand the industry, the players, the process. Bring your own style to it, but really understand who came before you, where they're going, and where the industry is going, so that you know where you sit in that industry. 

Don't pretend you know everything, but have your point of view. That's why you're you, and that's where creativity comes from, but understand the mediums that you're working in and who those people are in that industry. Become a student, go behind the scenes. Those are things you can't learn in school. You just have to learn by research and by meeting people and doing.