MiniMax H3: What creatives need to know
Learn what MiniMax H3 is, the creative capabilities MiniMax is introducing, and why this latest AI video model matters for creative workflows.
Every creative person has a version of the same problem: the work needs attention, and the world is very good at stealing it. For modern artists who work in tandem with the digital world, that tension is especially immediate. The tools that make the work possible sit inside the same digital environment as the feeds, messages, tabs, and half-formed distractions competing for space.
We asked 11 creative pros how they actually stay in creative flow: how they begin, what breaks their concentration, and what helps them stay locked in when the world will not quiet down. Their answers range from the practical to the personal to inspiring. Some rely on routine, solitude, or movement; others follow obsession, use AI agents to clear the friction, or make room for ideas to surface in dreams.
The common thread is that none of them treat focus as something to wait for.
Alena Stepanova
Alena Stepanova is a London-based AI designer specializing in fashion and lifestyle digital content. Through UnmadeUnmade, she explores digital storytelling, nostalgia, and human connection, with work presented at AI Fashion Week and featured by fashion and culture publications including ELLE and Business of Fashion.
“The more you fight the noise, the louder it gets. The world constantly pushes opinions, stimulation, information — everything competing for the same mental space. It’s very easy to get intoxicated by all of it and start losing sensitivity to nuance.
For me, staying in creative flow is not about surviving the loudness or reacting to the urgency. It’s about filtering better. Not everything is equally important, even when everything is demanding attention at the same intensity. I usually don’t start with the obvious focal point or the ‘hero’ of the idea. I start by creating space around it. I pay attention to things that exist more in the negative space — objects, moments, textures, small details that are complementary rather than central.
Sometimes that means slowing down or even allowing myself to get a little bored, which somehow sounds almost radical, but here we are. I understand why that can feel unsettling now, in this hyper-activated sense of urgency the world demands. But for me, it’s almost maintenance work. It’s what allows me to function creatively.”
Joyce Ng — alsoguppyme
Joyce Ng, also known as alsoguppyme, is a digital and AI artist exploring new aesthetics and visual language through still and moving image.
“I don’t really get into flow; flow gets into me when I stop trying to manage it. I work intuitively, not from a structured process or years of prior research. The work starts because it has to. Something is pulling, and I follow it. What breaks it is self-consciousness. The moment I start asking whether something is good enough, or commercial enough, or legible enough to an audience, it’s gone. I think I’m repeating myself. The work I’m most proud/happy of happened when I wasn’t curating myself.
Staying locked in, for me, is about removing the exit routes. I don’t outline. I don’t moodboard extensively. I start, and the resistance of the material tells me where to go next. The strange thing is that some of my most focused sessions have happened in the most chaotic and unfortunate circumstances. When the noise outside got so loud that going inward was the only option.”
Laura Rautjoki
Laura Rautjoki is a Finnish visual artist and photographer working at the intersection of photography, AI and contemporary visual culture. She holds a Master of Culture and Arts in photographic art from Turku University of Applied Sciences; her Dataset2024 project draws on an approximately 3,000-image dataset collected in Finnish landscapes to explore machine vision and humanity’s desire to preserve and control nature.
“Before having a child, my life was creative chaos. I worked constantly, slept irregularly, and romanticized that kind of intensity. After becoming a mother and slowly returning to creative work, I realized something almost painfully simple: for me, creative flow depends on structure, repetition, and a healthy everyday life.
These days, I usually wake up around 5 or 6 in the morning, before the rest of my family is awake, and work for an hour in silence. Then I continue once I return home after taking my daughter to daycare. I also train regularly, either in the mornings or before picking her up. My actual working hours are shorter than they used to be, maybe six or seven focused hours a day, but my concentration is much deeper now. Once my mind has had time to ‘warm up,’ I can enter an almost meditative state of focus.
I don’t really do creative work during family time anymore. That boundary has become important to me. I consciously leave space and silence for my mind because I’ve realized that the unconscious mind processes far more than we actually understand. Some of the most important parts of creative work happen outside active working hours.
I rarely work late into the evening anymore because I don’t want to accelerate my thoughts before sleep. Rest has become part of the work itself.
What breaks my flow is irregularity. I still think it’s healthy to occasionally break routines, but nowadays I value my mind, body and inner life too much to constantly live in chaos. I used to be more of a wild spirit, but now I genuinely enjoy ordinary routines. Over the years, I’ve realized how precious deep focus actually is.
I also try not to pay too much attention to the noise of the world. Most of it is just opinions, and opinions are not the same thing as truth or soul. I’m not very interested in spending my life trying to prove that I’m somehow correct, pure, or worthy enough. Life already contains enough mystery and small miracles without constantly performing certainty for others.”
Maria Mavropoulou
Maria Mavropoulou is a visual artist living and working in Athens. Her research-driven practice spans photography, screen captures, AI-generated imagery, archival material, and installation, examining how technological systems shape perception, identity, memory, and cultural production.
“To stay in creative flow, I have to be quite disciplined with my priorities. That can feel strict sometimes, because it means saying no to many smaller things, but if I am doing something that feels important, it deserves that kind of protection. On a practical level, my phone is always on mute except for calls, so notifications are easy to deal with.
Getting into flow is harder, and it usually begins when I decide that this is no longer a moment for gathering input, but to focus on output. For me, input can be life, research, reading, conversations, or simply paying attention to what is happening around me. At some point, I have to set aside the fear of missing out on events, information, or other possibilities, and move into a period where I am just making the thing, producing the output. It becomes a conscious decision to protect this period as a private, almost sacred time. In those moments, I treat my attention as something valuable and finite, not something to be spent unintentionally.”
Lohan Le Galloudec — filament_collective
Lohan Le Galloudec is a French multidisciplinary artist, music producer, sound engineer, and Doctor in Aesthetics and Art Sciences. Based nomadically in an old Mercedes van, he makes music, writing, and surreal digital artworks at the intersection of technology and nature.
“Creative flow is mostly about protecting solitude — not isolation, but a controlled bubble where I can focus. I’m very sensitive to sound: nature, a carefully chosen playlist, or even a genuinely interesting conversation can feed the work, but random noise or small talk will pull me out immediately. The other key is structure. I need a plan: I deconstruct the project into clear steps and small milestones, so I always know where I am, where I’m going, and what the next move is. Without that, it’s hard to stay focused because the work starts to feel directionless.”
Victoria ‘Vixy’ Abalos
Victoria ‘Vixy’ Abalos is a generative artist and creative director exploring, through visual essays, how technology mediates perception in the digital age. At the core of her work lies a recurring obsession: Is what I feel real or programmed?
“For me, creative flow is not a magical state or a sudden burst of inspiration. It is a practice: time, method, and trust. It means sustaining a search even when I still don’t know what form it will take. I think that’s the key: giving real attention to something uncertain, holding the chaos without forcing it to become useful too soon, and trusting that ‘it’ will appear at its exact moment.
I also think creative flow is closely connected to obsession. Not obsession as something rigid or destructive, but as a kind of sustained attention. There is always an idea, an image, or a question that keeps returning, almost insistently. For me, flow begins when I stop resisting that repetition and start following it. Obsession becomes a way of staying with something long enough for it to open up.”
Maddy Minnis
Maddy Minnis is a travel and environmental photographer and AI artist based in Mexico City. Her AI work extends her photographic practice through printing, scanning, physical and digital manipulation, and image generation.
“Getting locked in almost feels like shutting myself out. When I manage to shut myself up, then the ideas are free to move through me. This usually entails exhausting myself first in some way, be it climbing 6,000m peaks in the Peruvian Andes, tracking octopus in the Caribbean, or just reading too much news. That creates a vacancy that I am eager to fill again.”
Suzannah — X New Worlds
Suzannah is a London-based artist and designer working under the name X New Worlds, a project she launched in 2023 to explore digital image-making, generative tools, and custom AI workflows. With a background in design and code, her work draws on parasomnias, sleep paralysis, and lucid dreaming to create surreal worlds that exist between conscious and unconscious realities.
“For me, creative flow usually happens when I can disappear fully into experimentation without overthinking outcomes too early — following strange visual ideas and seeing where they lead rather than trying to force a fixed result. I tend to get into flow late at night or on the weekend when things are quieter, and there’s less noise competing for attention. I’ll often work with music looping for hours while moving between tools like ComfyUI, Claude Code, editing software, and image generation systems, exploring ideas. Time melts away at that point.
What breaks it most is fragmentation. I have ADHD, so context switching is especially a killer. I think protecting creative flow today is partly about creating enough psychological space to stay curious before self-consciousness kicks in. If I’m in a real rut, I go back to basics and free sketch with pen and paper. I also keep a dream sketchbook.”
Ohneis
Andries Ohneisser, known online as Ohneis, is an AI artist, designer, and digital nomad. He was one of the experts featured in Envato’s inaugural State of AI in Creative Work report.
“For me, getting into a creative flow is actually pretty simple. I think the main thing is finding a way to disconnect from the outside world for a bit. That can look different for everyone, but for me it’s usually just putting on my headphones, turning on noise cancellation, and getting started.
I think the hardest part is almost always the beginning. Once you’ve started and the first good results begin to show up, it’s much easier to get into that creative flow state.
What usually breaks it for me is when things aren’t working the way I imagined they would. For example, if I’m creating visuals and I can’t get them to look the way I see them in my head, and I keep trying over and over without getting there, that can pull me out of the flow pretty quickly. Constant interruptions from other people can do the same thing.
That said, I’m generally pretty good at staying focused. As a digital nomad, I don’t really have a permanent office, so I work from different places all the time — mostly cafés. When you’re working in those kinds of environments, you have to learn how to stay focused and not get distracted by everything happening around you, whether it’s people walking by, conversations in the background, or just the general noise of the place.”
Josh Gottsegen — Tropland Universe
Josh Gottsegen is the creator of Tropland Universe, a digital animal kingdom he has been building for over 20 years. His production background spans NBC Universal, Warner Bros, Disney, and Sony; he is also the author of three children’s books and an Amazon best-selling novel set in the Tropland world. Today the universe has more than 3 million followers worldwide.
“For me, flow starts with grounding in the present moment. If I want to get locked in, I typically will make hot tea or cold water with electrolytes. The fastest way for me to focus is to ground myself in the current moment with healthy habits. A nice beverage, comfortable clothes, and a peaceful environment fuel my creative soul and allow me to get lost in my imagination. Movement is also important. Getting up to stretch and move around every 30 minutes or so.”
Fabio Comparelli — Fabdream
Fabio Comparelli is a Geneva-based creative director and AI developer. Through Fabdream, he creates brand films, web experiences, AI automation systems, and AI storytelling tools; his short film The Second Renaissance was selected in the top eight at the Arca Gidan International Competition 2026.
“For me, it happens at night. I’m a BIM specialist by day, so my real creative window only opens once the day job is done and my daughter is asleep. That constraint is what protects it. I get into flow by just starting to make something concrete — an image, a short clip — the act of building pulls me in faster than planning ever could.
What breaks it is context-switching and the endless feed competing for attention. My answer was to build a small team of AI agents that handle the friction, the research, the editing, the busywork, so I stay in the intention instead of the mechanics. The AI is the brush, the artist is still human. Flow, for me, is killing the gap between the idea and the thing existing, and the agents do that part, so I stay on the idea.”
This piece is part of Envato’s Creative Flow: Activated campaign, a celebration of the creatively obsessed and how they work.
Feature image credit: Victoria ‘Vixy’ Abalos / Laura Rautjoki / Suzannah — X New Worlds
