Inspiration Ignites Creation

One of the few things that I will eternally cherish is the feeling of inspiration and connection that comes from different forms of media. I see my self as a creative person, but I recently noticed through my media courses how heavily I depend on inspiration to begin constructing an idea.

My first source of inspiration comes from the movies I watch. Nothing stirs my mind like 2 hours of good cinema. One of my favorite movies of all time is Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Inglorious Basterds. This historical fictional movie begins with my favorite scene of all time, where Nazi Colonel Hans Landa arrives at a dairy farm in France to interrogate the local farmer about rumors of his hiding of a Jewish family. This is the finest portrayal of tension and release that I've seen from a movie in a long time. Hans Landa sits with the farmer in his own kitchen, making himself quite at home, and barrages the man with calm questions as to whether or not he is actually hiding a family.

As tension builds, the simple French farmer begins to slowly break into the truth, which Colonel Landa extracted so intricately, about the Jewish family hiding in the floorboards just beneath the Colonel. The tension first releases when the Colonel orders his men to open fire onto the family below, killing all but one young woman. At this point, tension sets in once more as we watch her make a fumbling escape. The Nazi Colonel spots her running not too far off in the distance, draws his Luger pistol from the holster, and raises it to focus his aim on the girl, and after a second, tension releases for the last time in the scene when he decides to hold his fire and let her escape.

Dinner with Hans Landa is awkward to say the least

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My newly favorited animated film Wall-E also has an enticing and emotional introduction. In the opening scene, we pan through outer space to find our planet Earth as a future wasteland of trash and dirt. We are led to presume that the human race have abandoned Earth for some reason because there isn't a single sign of life. This is the first time I really noticed how active one's mind is while experiencing this scene. No information pertaining to the disappearance of man or the environmental catastrophe is spoon fed in a didactic manner.

Now this is only a small portion of the opening scene, but the same patterns follow with unexplained shots of the now-destroyed appearance and functionality of our planet.

 

Honestly, "Put on your Sunday Clothes" makes the entire movie.

And you know what, it blows my mind even further that as an animated film geared towards children, Pixar asked for a lot of engagement through it's active scenes.

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Family Guy is one of the only animated series that I truly appreciate. Seth MacFarlane, creator and main voice actor, is my hero for his no-fear expressionism through Family Guy. He has a loud liberal voice throughout the show, but it usually provides corrections to common misunderstandings about contemporary issues.

For instance, here is a typical dialogue between the ever-naive Peter Griffin and his political-literate dog, Brian. (Brian is Seth MacFarlane's main vehicle of social and political expression.) This scene involves the issue of the attacks on September 11th. Peter represents a misunderstanding American while Brian corrects him with proper knowledge on the subject.

Albeit Peter's first line about AIDS is a bit ridiculous, but then he asks about the many different ideas that many American's confuse as the truth about the terrorist attack until Brian explains to Peter in a paraphrased truth. Peter is a caricature of the uninformed and irrational American, and this is an example of subtext.

Modern day Plato and Aristotle