The idea can come later.

I’ve often worked on projects where the style was signed off before there was really an idea. A moodboard, a mood reel, a texture borrowed from here, a movement from there and a few well-chosen references made the direction clear enough to discuss with the client and put their mind at ease. But once all of that was approved, the references became the brief, and the concept was left to come up with a reason for the whole thing. That sometimes produced films that still looked a lot like their mood reels, with flashes of key images, clever transitions and bits that the music helped hold together, more or less convincingly.

Choosing an aesthetic means agreeing on a look, which still leaves quite a few things to work out. The approach is how the subject is tackled, and the concept is the idea the project is built around; the style takes shape through the choices of rhythm, framing or storytelling that give it all form. The same concept can work across very different aesthetics, and the same aesthetic can serve concepts that have very little to do with each other, so getting the images approved doesn’t say much yet about what the project has to offer.

With all the AI tools being spat out week after week, finding references, picking out certain qualities and combining them to answer a brief starts to look like a very familiar process, minus a few meetings. If an aesthetic becomes easier to achieve, it does less to set a project apart and the approach starts to matter more, because a subject might deserve better than being an excuse to show off the latest tool.

There’s also the question of what these images are saying, beyond the visual treatment that looked good in the moodboard. The subject, the context and the audience change how they’re read, and understanding those conventions also means being able to choose which ones to throw out.

That doesn’t mean everything has to be settled before working with images, or that it takes a dissertation to earn the right to experiment: a material or a movement can be enough to spark an idea. The problem starts when that exploration becomes an obligation to look like something else, because an idea that’s even slightly new already has a hard enough time getting anywhere without being asked for references before it’s even taken shape.