Creative Influences...

(1A).

TO CREATE FOR THE MASSES...

It is hard to define what type of creative person I am, because this is constantly changing...

I started writing when I was six years old when my family moved to Osaka, Japan. I kept a typed journal every day, and though some times this was tedious, looking back on it, I am very happy to have a bank of textual memories.

Since I have been back in the states, I have tried several times to start a journal up again, but always find myself wanting to write something less non-fictional, always finding the stories that I can create in my mind more interesting than telling actual events. This being said, I think I initially wrote for the sake of memory, and slowly moved from there towards creation for self-fulfillment.

I didn't begin writing for others until I was in high school. My freshman year, I started a web site so that my friend Tsuyoshi Sugiyama and I could write together, despite the distance that was usually between us. Unintentionally, this site quickly had over fifty members, becoming a small, online writer's group for a few of us who, despite our ages, believed we had a lot to say.

Summer after my freshmen year of high school, my family moved to Athens and my life changed. At first I saw this move as a bad thing, but eventually found that there were many more people in Athens interested in creating than there had been at my old school. In addition, I had gotten my first video camera eight days before our family made the move, and I was ready to make the most of the tiny Sony Mini-DV despite its limited capabilities...

My second month in Athens (now a sophomore in high school) I began editing on a computer for the first time at the local public access station. Though the audience of channel 23 is no where close to the size of the audience I hope to eventually reach, it was nice to get my message and my movies out there.

I soon realized that it was much more fulfilling to create for an audience than to create just for myself. Though I had enjoyed looking back at my journal from Japan throughout the years, I realized that what it contained would mean very little to people outside of my family.

The dilemma of creation for the self or creation for the masses plagued me for a few years as I transitioned to almost entirely fictional writing. Now, I never wrote anything if I wasn't intending on showing it to at least one other person.

When I entered college, my grades were not high enough to even attempt to get into the media school (then known as the School of Telecommunications). Though I knew by then that being a part of the creative process in film in some way was what I wanted to do, I was forced to choose another major. Unsure what else I would ever want to do with my life, I enrolled in the only other choice that seemed natural to me: creative writing...

And the following two years were unfulfilling. I quickly decided that the only way that I could achieve my goals was to bring my grades up so that I could transfer into the School of Media.

And this year was finally the year that I began classes in video production, a junior-freshmen of sorts. It is very humbling to be so far behind, but it is only all the more incentive to work that much harder towards the goals that I have maintained for so long. Knowing all along that I am the type of creative person that works for the audience instead of himself, I quickly found the outlets within the School of Media that I had sought for so long, finally able to get my message out there...

Influences...

Though I am obviously more of the visual ilk when it comes to creativity, there are few people who inspire me more than the hip hop artist Lupe Fiasco. Inexplicably, Lupe Fiasco has probably inspired me the most creatively in the past two or three years is Lupe Fiasco. Below is the song "Hip Hop Saved My Life" off of his 2008 album "The Cool":

Lupe Fiasco...

The thing that I probably love most about Lupe Fiasco is his lyrics. In one verse, his text and subtext can be speaking complete opposites. In the example above, it seems the the young rapper that Fiasco is talking about has no talent, but the understanding the subtext lets you know that this is the point: that it does not take greatness to become famous now.

Andy Kaufman...

Though I give a longer explanation of Andy Kaufman and why he inspires me in my next post, "Ideas...", I will say that there is no one who compares to Andy Kaufman comedically in my mind. His willingness to intertwine the audience's expectations with his own, opposing delivery is, to me, sheer genius. One of the methods that Kaufman often used to employ is the idea of tension and release. Kaufman would often build up tension in the audience, such as when he would challenge any woman in the audience to come up and wrestle him, offering them his hand in marriage if they were to beat him. The audience would be on the edges of their seats until eventually the gag would be revealed. Some times, Kaufman would defy the dyad of tension and release, only building up the tension with no release (such as the story about The Great Gatsby in my next post). Though this would usually create a negative reaction from the audience, this negative reaction seemed to be what Kaufman worked towards and thrived on.

Sin City...

Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez, has to be one of my favorite films of all time. There is something that is so cinematically, visually inspiring to me time and time again.

I think one of the ways the Rodriguez succeeds in making this film so captivating is by playing to the audience's conscious and subconscious minds. Consciously, we see that there is a lack of color except for a few reds, blues and yellows. Subconsciously, however, and most likely unbeknownst to us as the audience, the colors are creating a certain perception of the characters and events. Consciously, we see that Mickey Roark is covered in a deep, red blood that contrasts the greyscale surrounding him, but subconsciously we may not realize what that red color triggers in our minds.

FINAL QUOTE...

"It's so loud inside my head/with words that I should have said."

Lupe Fiasco.

JAC...