I took a class called Fundamentals of Digital Filmmaking during my first semester of my sophmore year at college. It was my first class I had taken that counted towards my Film major, and I learned a lot in it.

My professor was great and really knew her craft. But she said something to me one day that made me rethink the entire validity of the word creativity:

I don't think anything is original anymore.

I don't remember what the conversation was that sparked that response; all I remember is that one line. I like to think of myself as a creative individual. I like to express my creativity through writing and artwork and music and other things. I also used to harbor a deep seated dislike of anything that I deemed wasn't creative.

I wasn't a big fan of remakes, of music that sampled records, or of people plagarising others in the name of creativity. Upon having that fateful talk with my Digital Filmmaking professor, that drove me to think about what creativity really was, and whether it didn't exist like my teacher believed.

Creativity is definined as the ability to invent new ideas, concepts, things or what have you. But if you take a close look at what we call creative, you can see that there really isn't all that much originality involved.

We often talk about man creating fire when speaking about the earliest inventions. But fire wasn't anything new, it already existed in nature. Man really just created a way to make fire on command. The wheel is another example of "creativity" not really being original. In its most basic form, a wheel is really only a finely sharpened round rock.

Fast forwarding the clock, what we classify as a breakthrough in technology isn't all that revolutionary, either. This whole touch screen craze is one such example. We've been touching things to make them work for centuries! It would be more accuracte to call new inventions "renovations", becasue in essence, they are simply new, more optimal tools that provide the same old services.

When the creative lens is fixated upon art, the definition becomes even more discouraging. We all understand that art imitates life, but I don't think we internalize what that saying means. By that standard, that means that any piece of art, be it writing, music, paintings, or dance, is only a replica at its best.

That one line even throws the definition of plagarism into a discussion, because technically, everything is plagarised to some extent. If you grow up knowing how to bake cookies, and one day you decide to sell your own brand of cookies, you aren't required to cite your sources, or even name your influences! Most people do to pay homage and out of the goodness of their hearts, but you aren't required to, which is kind of strange.

So how can creativity ensue, when nothing is creative to begin with? When it boils down to it, I think the true definition of creativity is more akin to interpretation.

If two people were to make a movie, the same exact way with the same exact scenes, technically, they would both be original. No one can do the same thing as someone else and get the exact same results. That's one of the principle differences between man and machine.

And while I believe that no two people can produce the same thing even if they tried, that doesn't mean people should just copy each other because they are really only copying life. I feel people should take their own personal views about life and transition them into the things they create.

No two people are the same; even identical twins are not carbon copies of each other. This fact alone guarantees that creativity is inherit to everyone; it's really just a measure of exactly how creative a person can be.