Youtube

One recent innovation that it extremely easy to talk about regarding creativity is YouTube.  YT came into the scene a few years ago as a simple site that allows people to share short videos with each other.  This eliminates email attachments or USB flash drives or any of these inconvenient steps that used to be the means of sharing video.  Many other sites have now developed this video sharing aspect such as facebook and myspace and other social networking sites.  YT has strict rules when it comes to uploading videos.  The material must be yours, or you must have proper permission to post the video and its contents.  The content must be rated accordingly because nudity is not permitted.  This provides many people opportunities.  For example, certain people who post videos have been discovered for their amazing talents.  One of my favorite musicians I discovered on YT about a year ago, Ronald Jenkees.  He is a nerdy keyboardist who improvs off of previous beats, that he willingly credits, or beats that he makes himself.  His music is amazing, and on top of that he freestyles everything off the top of his head because he finds this is much more "fun," as he states many times in his videos, which makes people respect his talent.  Other people such as Bo Burnham, a young, suburban-type white kid who raps amazing lyrics that he writes in all metaphors, have been discovered and signed through YT.  His lyrics make you pause to stop and understand each line he says; he is ridiculously funny as well with his accuracy when making fun of certain topics such as high school parties.  YT is a one of many easy new ways now to get your name out there amongst the public.  If people like your stuff, they view it and rate and comment it, which makes your video "hot" on the YT network.  Contractors notice these "hot" people and look further into them, which leads to most of their success.  In this aspect, these people can be considered the representation of "real music" because the people vote on them.  They are not simply signed through politics like knowing someone in the business, or etc.  The fact that they are recognized by the big boys is because the people have voted on them, which means that they are almost guaranteed success.  The innovation of YT provides all of this.  I'm not sure if this is what the creator of YT originally intended of his site, but either way, this is extremely creative.

Video Production

The art of video production need not be explained about how much creativity is required.  I want to talk about some past projects I have had and a current project a couple of friends and me just started working on.  One main element that comes to my mind first is influences.  In any piece of work whether it be art, music, or video, one can recognize prior works that have influenced the newer work.  I'll analyze my works for example.  I am a huge Bam Margera fan; if you haven't heard of him, he's a professional skateboarder who has produced many videos and television shows throughout his career.  Certain elements he uses while making videos I find really cool.  He tends to get really "artsy," for lack of a better word, in his projects like videotaping the sky through the sunset over a course of a few hours, then in his video playing it in super-fast motion to make the scene look really cool.  He adds a lot of silent skateboarding with music in side-segments to side track the viewer in the middle of the plot of a story.  In my past videos I have videotaped traffic from the top of a garage tower over the course of an hour and played it in super-fast motion just like this.  I would add distortions to the color scheme and what-not as well to add extra "artsiness,"  and instead of adding skateboarding schemes I would add some of our free running scenes, which can be viewed in the last blog post.  I find certain influences to help give me the push I need to create new and cool aspects to add to my videos.  This is just one example of creativity in video production.

Free Running

One thing I discovered about 3 years ago was the art of free running.  Basically it is urban climbing.  Free running originated from the sport called Parkour, where traceurs, or the people who do it, display athletic ability by scaling buildings, jumping over and off of high objects, and getting from point A to point B quickly without any methods of transportation.  Free running is a variation of parkour; the difference is that instead of just trying to get from point A to point B, the free runner's purpose is simply to show off his moves.  Thus, free runners will do many different types of flips and martial arts while climbing buildings and etc.  When my cousin and I first saw this stuff 3 years ago we made it our goal in life to do it!  So we, along with a few of my friends back home in good ole' Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun Country, made several videos of our tricks, some of which I have on YouTube, and I have embedded a couple of them at the bottom of this blog entry... Check them out!  I promise they will entertain!  Seriously though, free running is one of my favorite past times, and I would argue that it isn't just something I do, it is a mindset I always have.  If anyone has seen me hanging out on the second story ledges of Bacot, or doing a flip off of a wall, or jumping off a ledge instead of taking the stairs, it is simply my mindset displaying what I love to do. Sorry if the vids are low quality :( ... not sure what's up.  The one at the bottom ends at 2:47... there's extra stuff after and it's pretty dumb... most of our influence is CKY and we got bored one night.  If you feel like watching it though be my guest

Probably 2 of our better compilations:

Satire

One genre I really enjoy, no matter what time period it comes from, is satire. I think all the way back to people we study in heritage such as Voltaire. I enjoyed reading his work "Candide" because it was a satire of all the old ways of thinking before the Enlightenment period such as religion, government, behavior, etc. As I said with sports, one way to justify if this genre is creative is to look at how successful it has been. Satire plays a huge role in our society today. Every other movie trailer I see on TV is making fun of something such as the Scary Movie series, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, practically every Bill Murray movie, and the all time classic, The Pink Panther starring Inspector Clouseau. All of my favorite shows are satires such as Family Guy, The Office, and an occasional South Park. Satire is very creative, and many people strive to create successful satires today.

Sports

One thing that really strikes my mind when I look at the big picture is sports. Sports are a dominant part of our society today, but where did they come from? I can't sit here and give a history lecture on the origin of sports because I truly do not know the origins of every sport, but I can say that I am very involved in sports and love the activity. I play football here at Millsaps so sports have basically always been a huge part of my life. When I think about it, sports are extremely creative. The rules of each game are very complex and go into great detail in order to make each game fair. No matter how simple the game is, almost anyone can testify to the enjoyment that these games bring to us. In order for games such as basketball, baseball, football, soccer, etc. to be successful, the creators must have had to experience the games first and create rules through trial and error. One way to justify that these creations or ideas are creative is to look at our world. Sports have been a common, enjoyable past time for people all over the world for centuries.

Music and Drugs

This week's discussion board about brain processes and the link to creativity got me thinking about a problematic topic... the whole drug scene in music.  A lot of the music I listen to is interesting to me because the group produces a sound that no other group produces, which is why a lot of the stuff I like is classified as alternative and by no means mainstream.  But now that I think about it, a lot of these groups are influenced by certain drugs.  This comes as no surprise to me because before I knew exactly which drugs influence certain bands, I had a pretty good idea considering some of this stuff is too whacked to have been done by sober individuals!  For example there's a group I consider extremely creative by the name of The Mars Volta.  They are constantly on acid trips writing, recording, or playing music live.  I got to see them live at Voodoo Fest this past year which was beyond awesome, and their show was extremely creative to me because most of their stuff is improv.  The first song they played is 7 minutes and 15 seconds on their album, however, they played this song for nearly 25 minutes at the show.  Their entire hour and a half show was comprised of 5 songs... unbelievable right?  When they record they put TV's and such in the studio so if the singer is inspired by anything he sees, he just sings about it and the band knows how to follow with certain improvisations.  Every time they play one of their songs it's different and it's like they will never play the same song twice.  Each of their albums has an extremely profound story behind it, probably some of the craziest stuff I've ever heard.  This seems really creative, but if it's influenced by drugs can we really give them credit for it?  My question is, if drugs influence the creativity of the individual, or group, is the creation considered creative?  I guess I would say yes because the creation is both novel and appropriate, following the definition in our book, but then maybe not give the creators full credit...

P2P sharing

As I look back on every new technology or idea that I have experienced in my generation thus far, I think, by far, one of the most creative ideas is peer-to-peer sharing.  First there was Napster, I had to be about 7 or 8 years old.  The basic principle is simple: everyone owns a little bit of music or video or program and uploads it to a main database.  Once the files are in the database, anyone can access them and download them to their computer.  This eliminates a lot of trouble for music fanatics and also television fanatics.  If you like any form of media, peer-to-peer sharing makes getting access to the media extremely easy.  You can find almost anything in these databases, from the most indie unheard-of music to computer games and home-made videos.  When I first heard of the program, I thought it was too good to be true.  Some methods of peer-to-peer sharing are obviously illegal, but I still think the idea is ingenious.  The person who came up with it didn't have to make any music or videos or games, but had an idea of how to make them easily accessible.  Since this is novel and appropriate for our time and age, the book would define peer-to-peer sharing as creative.  I think it is creative not only because it is novel and extremely appropriate, but because it is used by millions of people in our nation.  Just like Smash Brothers, the idea has been accepted as creative by our society, so it has stayed around for a very long time.  I know I use it simply so I can organize all of my music by albums because I love to listen to full albums and very rarely just a single song.  When I pull up my menu on my iPod when I drive, I always organize by album so I can listen to the "album experience."  This is made possible by the programs I use to share and organize my music.  Even the music I buy off of iTunes, which is about 90% of my music, I transfer and organize in different programs before I sync them to my iPod.  The creativity in peer-to-peer sharing is more of a conceptual idea than an actual product like music or art.