Where do I get my creativity?

As a creative person I take my influences from many different places. For my future career I want to work with sports like shooting football games, basketball games, baseball or working for ESPN. Anything along those lines is what I would like to do. Naturally as someone who wants to work with sports I get a lot of my inspiration from the stuff ESPN does. As I mentioned before though, I get my inspiration from many places not just sports. I’m a big movie fan and get out lot of inspiration from work some of my favorite directors. I also get a lot of inspiration from different musicians too.

One of my biggest influences is Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam. What inspires me most about him is that he is not afraid to pour his soul into his lyrics and the music fits perfectly with the emotions that he is trying to convey to his audience. To me the best example of this is the song “ Alive”. In this song he the text is about Eddie finding out when he was 13 that who he thought was his dad wasn’t at all. The whole song has a kind of relaxed mellow tempo, nothing to heavy or fast but I gradually builds and creates some tension for the listener. At the end of the song after a very calm guitar tone that is very soothing, they break into a fast heavy solo jam session that offers a release, both for the tension of the music and the lyrics. I hope that in my work I can convey these emotions to my audiences and I really respect Eddie Vedder for doing this.

My favorite influence as a movie director is Martin Scorcese. I’m a giant fan of all of his movies and I love the work that he does. The movies Taxi Driver, the Departed, Casino, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas and Raging Bull are among my favorite movies. Scorcese uses a lot of complex camera moves in his movies as well as big twists. In most of his movies he will spend the whole movie building up tension, for example the ending of Taxi Driver, to make a huge release. Scorcese also uses a lot of contrast throughout his movie. He is known for his Italian-American gangster movies which always include a lot of blood. He often makes the blood look as red as possible to contrast with the background. By doing this he always makes sure to emphasis violence. I’ve included the ending of Taxi Driver with this to show what I mean. Throughout the whole movie, the audience knows the guy is absolutely crazy and at the end he finally snaps and snaps big. He goes down with guns blazing and a ton of blood. I admire the way that Scorcese is able to put everything together to make fantastic movies.

Another influence of mine would be Kanye West. Kanye has changed the way rap has been made and in a way is a revolutionary. Before Kanye most if not all rap songs were behind heavy bass beats but Kanye has introduced collaborations into rap which other people wouldn’t have thought of. He has added synthesizers, pianos, guitars pretty much anything. This has gotten away and influenced a new breed of rappers such as Kid Cudi and B.o.B. With Kanye’s music, I’m sure a lot of people thought that the beats that he uses would contrast with rap but it has done the complete opposite. Kanye has created an affinity between his beats and his lyrics. Kanye has also made his more recent songs very didactic. Not necessarily in his older songs but in his new CD he is teaching lessons about being, for lack of a better word, an asshole. I’ve included the song Runaway with it to show the combination of piano into rap. This song is also a perfect example of him trying to teach a lesson that he’s learned.