I'm proposing a talk at SXSW EDU 2023 called "Designing Innovative Multimedia Programs for K-12" to introduce the implementation of multimedia programs to foster students' entrepreneurial mindset through inclusive filmmaking practices. You can now vote for my PanelPicker idea through Sunday, August 21.
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Going out with my camera on New York City’s streets these days transports me to the 1970s. When we think about New York City during the seventies, imagery comes to mind of a city undergoing unparalleled transformation fueled by economic collapse and rampant crime. We idealize it as a harsh time for the city but a terrific environment for the emergence of counter culture movements and creativity which has given the city the recognition and name that it has today. While John Cassavetes was taking advantage of this magnificent and contradictory natural set creating films such as Gloria, a new generation of would-be rock stars, artists, dancers, and actors freely walked the streets, squatted, or paid almost no rent.
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Last Wednesday I was walking the streets of Washington DC armed with my camera on my way to the White House. I was following the protests that for more than 10 days have been marching for justice for George Floyd, a Black man who died after officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he was handcuffed on the ground, shouting that he couldn’t breathe. I was waiting for the traffic light to change on the corner of Constitution Avenue and 15th Street when I ran into 3 young women holding signs that read “If You Are Neutral In Situations of Injustice, You Have Chosen the Side of the Oppressor,” “End Police Brutality, Black Lives Matter, No Justice, No Peace!” An African-American driver shouted to the girls “Yeah! Black Lives Matter!” “Shut up! All Lives Matter!” the Black woman sitting in the front snapped at him while smiling at me. But let’s be honest, all lives matter? Of course, but not until Black lives matter.
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During these unprecedented times we are consuming tons of information in articles and webinars debating how we can use technology while approaching educational issues. The problem is that most of those debates focus on the use of technology (medium) instead of considering the best approaches to create engaging content and practices with students through the use of technology. We should start with the content and think of technology as the delivery mechanism. In other words, the content should dictate how the technology is used and not the other way around; technology is not an objective in and of itself. It may seem obvious, but in a society driven by technology it is something easily forgotten.
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By Pablo Herrera (This article was first published by Colectivo Piloto on May 12, 2020)
I first came to New York City in 2011 to work in the documentary “The Building of A Community” commissioned by the “Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space”, a cultural institution which chronicles the East Village community’s history of grassroots action. The documentary examined the social transformation of the Lower East Side of Manhattan where activists, artists, historians and political representatives describe the neighborhood, the squatters, the community gardens and explain the struggle to save them. For me, it represented a singular way to discover New York City. Let’s be honest, people around the world (and almost all in the rest of the U.S.) know little about how life really is in New York City. Many people may think New York City is Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, SNL and things like that. Ok, good, but NYC is also tiny and expensive apartments, endless hours of work, high level of competition, pricey restaurants, and thousands of park bench people. This last group are not just NYC's props, they are real people who happen to live on the streets.
After almost a decade of living in an extraordinarily noisy city, I came to realize how much all that noise was affecting my perception of reality. Today, in times of pandemic we are experiencing NYC with less exciting distractions and more harsh realities. Following my instincts, I decided to grab my old SONY X10 camera and go out there to catch what's happening in the streets.
I started my route at 14 Street walking down 6th Avenue and then Houston Street to the Lower East Side. I walked nearly 6 miles around the city just to corroborate that the reality is, as I expected, harsh.
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By Pablo Herrera (This interview was first published by Colectivo Piloto on April 12, 2020)
It is not easy to keep optimistically working during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in a time fraught with uncertainty for those who work as independent filmmakers. But despite the anxiety and incertitude about the future, at Colectivo Piloto we keep doing our best to promote talented young filmmakers by giving them a platform to showcase their work.
It is for this reason that we are excited and proud to release the short documentary “Before He Starts” directed by Xin Fang, a talented young filmmaker from China living in New York City.
“Before He Starts” tells the story of Zhang Hongtu, a Chinese artist who emigrated to the US during the 80’s. His work explores the freedom to criticize the Chinese authorities afforded to an artist living in the West and reflects on themes of authority and belief (specifically the power of iconic imagery) and cross-cultural ‘East and West’ connections. These themes are largely derived from his “outsider” standing as a Muslim in China and, after his move to the United States, as a Chinese citizen in the Western world.
We spoke with Xin Fang about “Before He Starts,” what moves her work as a young documentary filmmaker and how she sees the future as an independent documentary filmmaker during and after these pandemic times.
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“In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”
Agnès Varda, the French New Wave pioneer who for decades beguiled, challenged and charmed moviegoers in films that inspired generations of filmmakers, has died last year. She was 90. With her loss I inevitably think about how important her work has been for our generation of filmmakers, and particularly refocusing her influence on my personal work. Agnès Varda has deeply impacted the way I frame and tell my stories.
For Agnès Varda to tell a story means to focus on observation.
The magnitude of the impact is in the use of the camera, the movements, the travelings. The absence of unnecessary sound effects and the extremely simple composition of the shots, without mention the importance and masterfully use of the “off camera space”. The place Agnès Varda occupied is irreplaceable. She loved images, words and people. I am proud to have started my career as a filmmaker watching, laughing and crying with her movies.
“The mind is like an umbrella. Its most useful when open.”
There is something poetic to the often-repeated story that the founder and builder of the Bauhaus, one of the most emblematic schools in the history of 20th century art, design and architecture could not actually draw. Whether sparked by this particular shortcoming or a grander desire to unify the arts, collaboration is a running theme in the life of Walter Gropius, an ideas man who did not always have the means to deliver. But, do you really have to draw to be a designer? The answer is not. I would say that maybe you will have a better chance to become a designer if you actually don’t know how to draw. I’m serious.
One of the most inspiring things in Gropius is his character: his decision, persistence and consistency. He was able to create a space for collaboration mixing millenary disciplines and those new ones brought by the industry. This is something that Steve Jobs understood well, not without being criticized because of course not! a programmer cannot be considered an artist. For me, a creative swimming between design, cinema, photography and music, Walter Gropius way of thinking it is not a whim, it is a necessary way to live.
“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. ”
Of all the artists who inspire my work Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the most influential. He has influenced not only my work in film and video production but it has also significantly impacted my work as a graphic designer, especially the use of color, composition, structure and sequence development. As Thomas Allen Nelson points out in his book “Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist's Maze”, Kubrick’s reputation as a film maker remains curiously anomalous. His eleven feature films constitute a nea-encyclopedia of cinematic exampla for film critics and theorists fascinated by both the structures of film rhetoric and the complexities of communicating with light and sound to an audience in the dark. Kubrick is for me that reference and inspiration.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the first Kubrick’s color movie is a symphony of pigments. Before creating the evocative visual structures of 2001, however, Kubrick again turned to what he considers the objectifying powers of the world. Kubrick's success in developing a cinematic organization (and a dynamic composition) of images and sounds can be measured in part by how well a fully novelized and explicit script fills out the essential temporal outlines of story and character. Colors dominate the narrative and create a dialogue between thoughts and actions. The red of HAL 9000, the blue of the asteroids, the black of infinity and the masterfully colored film negatives during the trip to the third dimension. Kubrick creates “beyond the infinity” without a loss of thematic integrity or narrative clarity.
“I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.”
Cortázar was the son of Argentine parents and was educated in Argentina, where he taught secondary school and worked as a translator. This is perhaps one of the most important points of my identification with Cortázar, my work mentoring teens for the last 15 years. But also, and as it happens with other artists like Agnès Varda, the passion and enthusiasm for telling common stories. He was on the opposite side of Jorge Luis Borges and I like that. He was not an intellectual, he was the common guy telling common things and I feel the same.
During the 2000s while I was living in Barcelona, I had a writer's part and Cortázar was without any doubt a big inspiration for me. By reading and studying him I understood the greatness of feeling like a common person, the originality and authenticity of finding a story in the courtyard of my house, in the bar, on the bench of the park. It was like discovering that life is much easier and simpler than you perceive. I'm still finding in Cortázar the reality as it is: inspirational and satisfactorily exciting.
“You’ve gotta blow the roof off of your heart and let the universe in.”
Lou Reed has probably been, as a single, the most important artist in contemporary music History; and indeed, my biggest musical influence. Now, clearly his work with The Velvet Underground is the reason why I stated the aforesaid thought, yet Lou solo career proves a key fact: he really was one of those artist (alongside few others, like David Bowie) capable of creating a distinctive way, while never remaining on the same. The funny thing is that my first listenings of Lou Reed were when I was helping my girlfriend with her thesis of architecture. There were long nights of music, cigarets and creativity. Lou Reed influenced both of us in a plenty spacial way.
Transformer is glam rock, Berlin places halfway between rock opera and baroque rock, Street Hassle is art rock with new wave strokes, The Blue Mask and New York both belong to the singer/songwriter genre - but with different overall atmospheres (the former is darker, the latter is cynical and aggressive) and a different approach to the writing (the former is very "empty" in order to feel immediate, the latter is overloaded in order to sound epic). Yet if you just listen to the first few notes of each LPs, you can feel "the artist" Lou Reed fulfilling them - such is his touch, his idea of Music, his essence.
“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”
Chris Marker, (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve), French filmmaker and multimedia artist born in 1921 and pioneered the essay film, an the avant-garde cinematic form that brings a personal approach to documentary and non narrative footage. Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful.
His best-known work, La Jetée (1962), is a short subject composed almost entirely of still photographs, with the exception of a brief film shot; the “plot” later served as the inspiration for the cryptic time-traveling drama Twelve Monkeys (1995).
