Voices of De Anza: What do you do to stay creative? Dispatch #005 Covering De Anza’s visual arts and culture March 7, 2016 Dispatchda.com lavozdeanza.com Left: Edoard De Armas, 23, film major, poses with his film camera in the Advanced Technology Center on Wednesday, Feb. 24. Keeping memory alive through works of art > see “film” on page 3 > see “memory” on page 2 Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology Paul Ledesma Staff Writer Talking art and diversifying the film industry with Edoardo De Armas vv Picturesque aerial shots of landscapes and intimate moments of a family harvesting mangoes encapsulate the opening sequence of “Mis Hijos,” a short film produced by Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, that premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival college competition on March 11. De Anza students are accepted every year, alongside filmmakers from USC, UCLA, NYU, SJSU, and more. However, De Armas was one of the first to produce a Spanish-language film for this year’s new International Stories category. De Armas states that what was intended as a project for his 16mm/35mm film production class became an emotionally charged project that paid tribute to his Venezuelan heritage and deeply personal relationship with his father. While De Armas has director and producer credit, it’s Edoardo De Armas, Sr. that has writer credit. The filmmaker explained the script was based on a poem his father wrote in the wake of the Kady Le STAFF WRITER Photos by Andrew Kaila I stay creative by doing a lot of art projects, mostly on my own, instead of using all of my energy on school projects. I listen to music to get all of my thoughts away. I also pull lots of my ideas from books, because they often shape or speak for things that are hard to articulate or understand in real life. So many of the ideas I want to express are hidden within the pages of a book.” ‘‘ “I like using Pinterest. Lately, I’ve been redoing my room, and I’ll go on Pinterest to find different ways to make it look cute. I love doing simple DIY projects, and it’s cool because I can make great stuff at a low price. Doing the projects myself lets me add my own twist to them, too.” ‘‘ For me, creativity is more of a lens that I turn on when I want to. Once I turn on that lens, I can channel anything into a story. Writing is my major art form, so I try to pick out little nuances and aspects of my daily life to use in my work, especially if I have writer’s block. When I have an idea, even if it seems silly, I try not to let it go, because it can be the root for a really good story if I work it enough.” ‘‘ Creativity, to me, means taking what you love and putting everything under that light. Because of that, even coding can be creative if you find a way to relate it to something you enjoy. Also, meditating works really well for me, and it helps me with the creative process, which is very methodological. You have to focus and channel creativity even more than you would channel something like math.” ‘‘ It is the sum of our own memories that defines who we are. Our childhood, what we know about our families and friends, are derived from memories. Everything that we know is captured in what we can recall about the past. They are also things we forget. Sometimes our brains protect us by repressing bad memories. From time to time, what we forget can create problems for the present, such as forgetting a loved one’s birthday or a password for an online account. As we get older, forgetting our memories becomes a more common fact of life.
Transcript
Voices of De Anza: What do you do to stay creative?
Dispatch #005Covering De Anza’s visual arts and culture
March 7, 2016Dispatchda.comlavozdeanza.com
Left: Edoard De Armas, 23, film major, poses with his film camera in the Advanced Technology Center on Wednesday, Feb. 24.
Keeping memory alive through works of art
> see “film” on page 3 > see “memory” on page 2
Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology
Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology
Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology
Mary Humpreys, 19 psychology
Paul LedesmaStaff Writer
Talking art and diversifying the film industry with Edoardo De Armas
vv
Picturesque aerial shots of landscapes and intimate moments of a family harvesting mangoes encapsulate the opening sequence of “Mis Hijos,” a short film produced by Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, that premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival college competition on March 11.
De Anza students are accepted
every year, alongside filmmakers from USC, UCLA, NYU, SJSU, and more. However, De Armas was one of the first to produce a Spanish-language film for this year’s new International Stories category.
De Armas states that what was intended as a project for his 16mm/35mm film production class became an emotionally charged project
that paid tribute to his Venezuelan heritage and deeply personal relationship with his father.
While De Armas has director and producer credit, it’s Edoardo De Armas, Sr. that has writer credit. The filmmaker explained the script was based on a poem his father wrote in the wake of the
Kady LeSTAFF WRITER Photos by Andrew Kaila
I stay creative by doing a lot of art projects, mostly on my own,
instead of using all of my energy on school projects. I listen to music to get all of my thoughts away. I also pull lots of my ideas from books, because they often shape or speak for things that are hard to articulate
or understand in real life. So many of the ideas I want to express are
hidden within the pages of a book.”
‘‘ “I like using Pinterest. Lately, I’ve been redoing my room, and
I’ll go on Pinterest to find different ways to make it look cute. I love doing simple DIY projects, and it’s cool because I can make great stuff at a low price. Doing the projects myself lets me add my own twist to them, too.”
‘‘
For me, creativity is more of a lens that I turn on when I want
to. Once I turn on that lens, I can channel anything into a story. Writing is my major art form, so I try to pick out little nuances and aspects of my daily life to use in my work, especially if I have writer’s block. When I have an idea, even if it seems silly, I try
not to let it go, because it can be the root for a really good story if
I work it enough.”
‘‘ Creativity, to me, means taking what you love and putting
everything under that light. Because of that, even coding can be creative if you find a way to relate it to something you enjoy. Also, meditating works really well for me, and it helps me with the creative process, which is very methodological. You have to focus and channel creativity even more than you would channel something like math.”
‘‘
It is the sum of our own memories that defines who we are.
Our childhood, what we know about our families and friends, are derived from memories. Everything that we know is captured in what we can recall about the past.
They are also things we forget. Sometimes our brains protect us by repressing bad memories. From time to time, what we forget can create problems for the present, such as forgetting a loved one’s birthday or a password for an online account. As we get older, forgetting our memories becomes a more common fact of life.
2Above: a scene from Edaordo De Armas’ short film “Mis Hijos” Left: Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, poses with the movie camera he uses to shoot films in the Advanced Technology Center on Wednesday, Feb. 24.
> from “memory” on page 1
Dispatch March 7, 2016
Memories can play tricks on us. They fade over time.
What was the name of that girl who was my first slow dance partner at the seventh grade dance? For a 12-year-old boy, there are fewer moments more magical than a first kiss or a first slow dance. Even today, when “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” comes on the radio, I am transported back to that dimly lit gymnasium; holding her ever so gently as she softly sang along.
But, 43 years later, that memory is now faded and at the same time, probably highly embellished from watching too many melodramatic John Hughes movies in my twenties. I also don’t remember anyone teaching me how to dance. I was no doubt stepping on her toes; a typical 12-year-old clutz.
Memories are reductions of actual experiences that have been highly seasoned by subsequent ones. I think of this process as the fountainhead of our own sentimentality.
We tend to remember the best of what happened, like the magic and sweet agony of that first slow dance. We forget stepping on each other’s toes and the pepperoni pizza we probably both had for dinner that night.
The tension between the actual and the remembered is a deep well that artists have drawn from since the first humans drew on cave walls. Today, many artists continue to emphasize this theme.
In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen said that we are always trying to get things to come out perfectly in art because they rarely do in real life. Conspiring with time, our memories aid and abet this process, making actual events in our past that were slightly imperfect appear a little less imperfect in our memory.
Many artists, including Allen have weaved motifs of
memory into their work. But the richness and complexity of how it actually works in our lives is rarely touched.
Two artists working in different mediums have approached the subject with unique results. In the work of Jim Campbell, memories are luminescent fragments reduced to a handful of pixels and primary colors. These brightly colored fragments suggest how time diminishes the detail of our recollections. For the writer, Patrick Modiano, the fragments of our memories exist, not only in our own minds, but also in physical fragments of newspapers and photographs, as well as in the distant memories of people all over the world.
Jim Campbell’s work last month at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, This work was striking in how he chose to represent the ideas of reduced and idealized memory. Campbell
uses old home movies as source material. He takes these old film images and further reduces them to a handful of pixels.
The images are projected on walls, captured inside Plexiglas and suspended from the ceiling. Made up of hundreds of individual LEDs, each image had an ethereal quality that was familiar and other worldly at the same time. Campbell wants you to see the inner beauty of human movement and natural forms. They glow as the human movement has been pared down to the sublime shift of a single LED pixel going dark and the adjacent one turning on to carry the motion forward. The use of old home movies in these digital images allows the lives of people in them to appear distant in time suggesting how time fades memories.
Another artist drawing on memories for his work is French author Patrick
Modiano. Modiano was unheard of in the United States before winning the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, since very few of his books were available in English.
Modiano stories often center on the Nazi occupation of France during WWII and the memories of those who survived. For some characters, simply trying to remember their own lives and families through the horror of wartime memories is the conflict of the story. For others, it’s the memory of a happy and sheltered childhood while the adults around them do whatever is necessary it is to survive.
The film script Modiano wrote for director Louis Malle, “Lacombe, Lucien,” is the story of a shameful episode in a nation’s past that many would rather deny or repress. When the film came out in 1974, its depiction of those in France who collaborated
with the Nazis was a painful memory for many and angered others who wanted to never remember such van event.
Modiano’s stories are almost always told as the reconstruction of recollections from decades earlier. People try to piece together pasts from fragments of other people’s faded memories. The truth, when revealed, is often painful and filled with regret. In life, resolution rarely comes wrapped up with everyone receiving an appropriate measure of justice.
Regarding the artistic journeys of Jim Campbell and Patrick Modiano, the past is as uncertain as the future. While the past can comfort, it can also bring distress to those who seek to see beyond what their own memories have chosen to provide them. The challenge is to learn and to make a better world from the lessons the past reveals.
Voz News, the voice of the college, and is an alternative art-newspaper dedicated to covering and reporting De Anza’s creative culture and artists.
In reporting on individual artists, collaborative work, and events through longer, in-depth articles and colurful photostories and illustrations, we strive to develop and maintain a platform to exhibit the news, perspectives and opinions of De Anza’s artists, and stimulate a community amongst them.
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> from “film” on page 1
Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major
There’s something about Spanish that’s extremely emotional and there’s so many levels to the the wording.”
‘‘
Above: a scene from Edaordo De Armas’ short film “Mis Hijos” Left: Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, poses with the movie camera he uses to shoot films in the Advanced Technology Center on Wednesday, Feb. 24.
Left: Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, focuses one of three lenses on his camera. Each lens is usually equiped for wide angle shots, close-ups, and shooting in low-light situations.
Left: Edoardo De Armas, 23, film major, said an assignment for his 16mm/ 35mm film class turned into an emotionally charged project about his Venezuelan heritage and relationship with his father.
Dispatch
March 7, 2016 Dispatch
Bolivarian Revolution, which was the reason De Armas Jr. and his sister moved to the US.
De Armas recounts his first exposure to filmmaking was in seventh grade as an ESL student. Despite speaking broken English at the time, he said, he was able to find his school’s broadcasting studio. He then enrolled in video production classes alongside broadcasting classes through high school.
“From there, it was kind of my decision of either doing broadcast or doing film and I started to do film because [it was] more artistic,” said De Armas. “You can break the rules, you can tell your own stories.”
De Armas also worked alongside professionals in the field as a production assistant on the Oscar-nominated movie, Steve Jobs, when filming began at the Flint Center in Jan 2015.
“The experience was amazing -- just how everything works,” said De Armas. “Delivering lunches to cameramen. That was a big learning step for me! But just not my taste at the moment.”
While De Armas believes he’s grateful for that experience, he states he’d rather work on independent productions that will put him on the forefront of diversifying the film industry.
“After making ‘Mis Hijos,’ that just really solidified what I really wanted to do,” said De Armas. “Which is to tell the immigrant story, to tell the Latino rich culture. Not just as gang members.”
According to De Armas, “Mis Hijos” had nuances that he intended to appeal to his family and Spanish speakers.
“Definitely the emotional depth was lost in the translation,” said De Armas, referring to the subtitling process. “There’s something about Spanish that’s extremely emotional and
there’s so many levels to the wording.”
Now, De Armas is working on a new short film, “The Moth,” that incorporates both Spanish and English.
“It’s a beautiful story about transculturalism in America,” said De Armas. “It’s a unique story depicting two female characters, a teenager and her abuelita… It’s pretty much about this young girl in a patriarchal family who finds her spiritual core through easing her grandmother through death.”
“The Moth” features a primarily Latino cast. The filmmaker recounted that when he was auditioning Latino actors and actresses, they expressed relief that they weren’t downsized to racial tropes, but rather authentic characters.
“I had these actors coming in and one of them told me, ‘Your script is so nice because it doesn’t put me in a box. It doesn’t hide my accent. It doesn’t make me look like a gang member,” said De Armas.
With Latino Americans being one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country, De Armas states that the film industry will have to eventually acknowledge Latinos as a formidable demographic.
“There’s going to be over 100 million Latinos soon. Literally in the next 20 year. They’ll want to watch films about their culture,” said De Armas. “And I’m going to be right there.”
De Armas believes his mission now’ as a filmmaker is to champion relatable and multifaceted Latino American narratives in the mainstream film industry.
“You know how there’s the American New Wave?” said De Armas, referring to the young generation of filmmakers in the 60s through 80s, “I’m going to start the Latino American Film Wave.”
4March 7, 2016 Dispatch
Kombeze Ataie and Freddy Flores, collaborators for
the better part of three years, are co-presidents of the 4 Elements of Hip-Hop organization at De Anza College, an art collaboration that fuses the work of rappers, producers, break-dancers and graffiti artists.
Ataie, 22, an accounting and political science major, found his groove in hip-hop through beat production. A calm, pensive mind, Ataie writes lyrics, but says he mainly chooses to release instrumentals through his SoundCloud.
On the other hand, Flores, 22, political science major, demonstrates qualities readily befitting a rapper: a sometimes-abrasive passion for his vision and a matching veneer of self-indulgence.
To understand the organization they manage, there’s no better place to start than with its distinct yet cohesive co-presidents.
Both Ataie and Flores said they fell in love with hip-hop at a young age, and became more involved with the art form as they tried to follow the footsteps of their mutual idol: Tupac Shakur. Shakur’s synthesis of socially conscious themes and braggadocios lyrics is what drew the two to his music.
Further, Tech N9ne’s unrepentant lyrics depicting
the darker side of the human experience was a catalyst for Ataie’s love of Rap. For similar reasons, Flores cites Big L, a pioneer of horror-core rap as an underappreciated colossus of the industry.
Ataie and Flores assert that society’s distaste towards violence in hip-hop is unwarranted, and one can reverse it if one with an open mind.
“[Tech N9ne’s] creative storytelling, talking about being overpowered by his violent tendencies, his inner conflict and his self-awareness is an important issue in music in general,” said Ataie, regarding the abrasive nature of explicit songs.
Ataie and Flores believe that societal pressures can be used to marginalize and shame creatives into giving up their power. Flores said artists must understand that more often than not, they “let [themselves] be oppressed” through censorship. He said that if artists are organized and confident, but remain responsible, they can do great things.
However, changing indoctrinated beliefs is easier said than done. Ataie understands that rewiring society starts from the ground up.
“You have all these things that are bigger than any one person, so how does an individual go about changing
Drawing challenge: De Anza students create new school mascot
Student profile: Kombeze Ataie and Freddy Flores of 4 Elements of Hip-Hop
Axel Mejia, 19, psychology major
Edgar Godinez, 20, philosphy/ DASB chair of finance
Anthony Sok, 21, undetermined
Omar Din, 18, senate
that? For me, it’s all about putting out music consistently that people can relate to,” said Ataie.
Ataie and Flores thus provide opportunities for artists to express themselves through their organization. 4 Elements hosts an open mic at De Anza the first Thursday of every month and is currently finalizing plans to hold a concert on campus. The group is collaborating to produce an album, the goal of which is to incorporate all four forms of hip-hop art.
The co-presidents subscribe to unique philosophies when it comes to their art: Ataie describes himself as “another living being” and Flores crowns himself “a Pharaoh,” the Son of Ra. But through the blend of Ataie’s tranquil intuition and Flores’ kinetic impulse, the duo hopes to work with De Anza to refine hip-hop and music as a whole.
“432 is the frequency of the universe,” said Flores. “You play any sound at that vibration, and anyone hearing it will say, ‘That shit’s dope.’”
Above: Kombeze Ataie, 22, political science major, and Freddy Flores, 22, political science major, pose in downtown San Jose on Saturday, Feb. 20.
Above: Kombeze Ataie, 22, political science major, and Freddy Flores, 22, political science major, pose in front of a mural on 1st street in downtown San Jose, an area well known for harboring local artists of all kinds.
De Anza is offically known as the “Dons,” but any sign of a mascot is noticably absent from everything from school sports games and uniforms to promotional and official material used by the school.
The absence of a De Anza mascot could be attributed to a variety of reasons, such as a reminder of the colonization of California, and not being representative of female athletes and students.
Dispatch editors decided to ask the student body to create a new mascot, under a couple rules: you have 3 colored crayons and 2 minutes to make a new mascot.
