Years ago, I did a course on creativity and innovation led by NLP trainers Michael Breen and Eric Robbie, two seriously smart guys who know what they’re talking about — Michael built Paul McKenna’s training business into a multi-million pound success in the recession of the nineties, and Eric’s work in advertising includes the classic ‘fox and polar bear’ animations for Fox’s Glacier Mints.  One of the tools they introduced us to was a typology of approaches to creativity developed by Alex Osborn back in the thirties, based on his observation that the people he worked with had different ways of being creative.  Bob Eberle took Osborn’s approach further and evolved it into the model known as SCAMPER — each letter stands for three processes that can be applied to any input (musical riff, felt pen doodle, story concept, business idea…).

The M in SCAMPER stands for Magnify, Minify, and Modify, and it occurred to me recently that there are examples of all of them at work in various facets of popular culture.  Magnify is the one that drew my attention most, and one example of it in action is Tim Cunningham’s lovely short film 1:10 Score.  He’s taken one aspect of the classic heist film — making a model of the place to be robbed — and turned it into the entire focus of his film, with a protagonist who’s got obsessed about his diorama and needs the robbery to succeed to pay for it.  Tarantino does something similar with Reservoir Dogs, a heist film that’s all about what happens after the actual heist.

So, one way to use magnification to create a story is to look at something you’ve already seen and amplify one element of it so that it becomes the core of a new story.  Hmm.  OK, let’s take The Yards, which I saw recently, and find an aspect of that to magnify.  The one that seems most obvious is the business of how the family and their rivals carve up business restoring damaged trains, and foreground that rather than the family conflict which the film actually concentrates on.  As such, it becomes less a film about dynasty, and more one about the ground level mooks who do the dirty deeds that the senior members of the family profit from.  Magnify even more, and the new story could be based on the incident where the hero, who’s gone along to observe, ends up dealing serious damage to a cop at the railyards.  The effect is to make the tale more West Side Story than The Godfather, with the emphasis on young men caught up in the only work they can find, and how a relationship can be affected by violence.

The principle of magnifying doesn’t have to keep you within conventional bounds.  Performance artist Laurie Anderson does a wonderful spoken word piece imagining what would happen if sperm were the size of sperm whales, and imagines a sperm whale flying from New York to Tokyo at Mach 7, this being the scaled-up speed of human ejaculation.  That skit may have been the inspiration for a Channel 4 trailer I’ve seen, in which loads of men get dressed up identically to pose as sperm, for a documentary in which the herd of men are followed and winnowed down until just one of them gets to fertilise an egg.

Colin, the £45 zombie feature that made an impact at Cannes recently, could be looked at as a case of magnifying the basic concept of a zombie film, which has hordes of the undead, to focus on just one mobile corpse.  A more literal example is Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, and a writer friend has pitched a Dr Who concept based on a briliantly simple premise that’s another case of magnification.  Anyway: you get the idea.  Magnifying is a way of developing concepts, and one that’s well worth exploring if you want to come up with ideas that you’d not have come up with otherwise.  And that’s just one of 3 options for the letter M, itself one of 7 letters in SCAMPER, which makes for another twenty ways of coming up with new ideas.  Subtext being: don’t come to me with your tales of writers block, when you haven’t explored the options available to take that block and do something cool with it.