Blank Space Creatives is a student organization that puts its own creative spin on what a typical club looks like on campus. Composed of a team of talented student photographers and videographers, Blank Space works as a student-run production team that can be hired out by other organizations on the College of William and Mary’s campus and in the greater Williamsburg community.
President Nate Boyle ’27 and Vice President Mayer Tawfik ’27 originally came up with the idea their freshman year after realizing that the College was a missing space for creatives in the photography and videography space.
“So I came up with my own work and made that process happen with a couple other people,” Boyle said.
By creating a collective of artists for hire, Blank Space has given young creatives a new opportunity to broadcast their work and gain connections that can be the stepping stones for their future creative successes.
Since the group’s founding in spring 2024, Boyle and Tawfik have built up an exclusive group of students who have honed their craft.
“We see people with talent, we reach out and say, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good, would you want to work with us?’” Boyle said.
With Blank Space acting as the platform for artists to promote and share their work, students can be hired out for gigs that require smaller production crews.
“We just try to do gigs individually, but those are also under the umbrella of Blank Space Creatives,” Boyle said.
Professionalism and high-quality projects are at the forefront of the work that Blank Space puts out. While they tried the weekly general body meeting format in their first year, they realized that the format was not conducive to the creative space they wanted to provide for fellow artists.
“My original vision for Blank Space Creatives, and that still holds true, is creative expression, putting our name out there, building a brand and building a stylistic production team for hire,” Tawfik said.
While they are eager to be able to host club-centered events in the future, the collective is currently focused on establishing their presence on campus.
“Coming up, we have Stompfest, we’re covering that, taking pictures for [Black Student Organization],” Boyle said. “Just generally graduation pictures, birthday pictures, chapter pictures, all that kind of stuff.”
Through working with clubs like BSO as well as Syndicate Hip Hop Dance Team, and working with the Student Center for Inclusive Excellence to produce its 50th anniversary video, the group is already hard at work in their second year.
“Right now we are working on building up our brand, building up our reputation and building up awareness of us,” Boyle said. “Hopefully, we could pivot to also including more community-wide events, like showcases where we could elevate other artists.”
In the meantime, the collective is working on a fashion project that would allow them to have full creative control.
“We’re super in touch with the fashion scene in the area, a bunch of different designers and stuff like that,” Boyle said. “It is going to be a Blank Space-central body of work, whereas a lot of the other work we do is for the orgs that hire us.”
Members are drawn by the exclusivity of the collective, which allows them to provide a marketable service that is entirely run by students.
“Actually, I think just like I’m excited to be more of this business-forward organization where we’re here to serve other organizations and clubs,” club member Lukas Richardson ’28 said.
Richardson is a videographer and photographer for the collective who shares Tawfik and Boyle’s vision about the outlet that Blank Space can provide. His time in the club has already been fruitful. He shared how the collective helped him get connected with the greater campus community.
“Later, with the opportunity to shoot fashion and all the other clubs and groups that we might run into, just exposure to every corner of student life that I alone would not have the chance to reach is my favorite aspect,” Richardson said.
While the club prides itself on its professionalism and prefers to have a production team of videographers and photographers with established portfolios, they are open to teaching those who have an interest in pursuing their creativity.
Further, Blank Space never wants the cost of hiring their services to be a barrier to creativity on campus.
“If people have an idea and it’s creative and they necessarily don’t have the funds, they could reach out anyways,” Tawfik said. “If we have photographers who have time and are willing and are interested in the project, money is not a barrier to that. But sometimes art is like that, you don’t have the money to do art, and that’s okay.”
Echoing this sentiment, Boyle said Blank Space, at its core, is a space where creatives come together and find community.
“We love when people come to us with these creative ideas,” Boyle said. “For example, I would say a personal favorite project that I’ve worked on is a promotion video for the [Orientation Area Directors] where they’re pretending to be like the sharks from Shark Tank. So we love when people come to us with these wacky ideas, and then we’re able to kind of put that out there and make that real. I’d say that is kind of our goal as a club.”
Beyond being a collective, Blank Space serves as a jumping-off point for creative expression, for both organizations on campus and the photographers and videographers working on these projects themselves. To reach out for hiring inquiries and to support Blank Space events, check them out on Instagram (@blankspacecreativeswm).
