This was my motion picture film. I had a fairly difficult time trying to come up with an idea for my film. I was thinking that I wanted to be shooting a ball moving around and have someone then eat the ball, but I still didn’t feel that was enough for the film. Then, I watched a video of Murray Gell-Mann giving a talk to Google employees about creativity. He talked about how in every creative process lies an aspect of randomness and that in order to boost creative, one could simply take the last word in a random New York Times article everyday and think a little bit about that word. So I tried it out and ended up with “Trump.” I was a little skeptical of the concept initially since Trump is literally on every media outlet today. But then I realized that his presence in media did fit my “ball” theme of consumption. So I decided to shoot the movie combining the two ideas and ultimately play with editing to extract the themes of consumption and excess. Moreover, the title comes from the idea that we can tell our own stories. I think it relates to Trump’s presence in the media and how he can shape and manipulate his own narrative being told to others.

I really like this idea of combining two concept together and making something work out of it. I think I first heard this method from Charlie Kaufman talking about “Being John Malkovich.” He talked about how he had this idea of traveling inside a tube and being in someone’s head and this other idea of being John Malkovich, so he took these two ideas and mashed them together. I found this a really interesting and kind of random way of doing things, but I hope to use this creative process again in future projects.