Translator: Jaewon Sim Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
So it's hard to answer the question, how am I creative
or how do I make my videos
because I personally don't know the answer to that.
Art just has been a part of my everyday routine
and ingrained into my life.
You could ask me how I breathe
and I know it is the rising and the falling of my chest,
to my lungs and my air
but I don't know the details personally.
When you get used to a lifestyle, you don't have to stop and think it more.
You don't walk down the street and all of a sudden you forget how to breathe.
No, it's a routine, it's a rhythm.
Asking me how I do my art and how I create my film,
well, that's just asking me how I live.
So my name is Sonia and for the past two years, I have been creating videos online,
using my own style and figuring out
how exactly do I fit to this entire film world
that is constantly growing and getting more and more creative
and I have reached on to the world online and have been working on YouTube,
and have this amazing community of people all around me
and it's been this incredible experience so far.
I've also been diving into the world of documentaries
and it's been amazing learning how to tell other people's stories.
Another personal style I like to use is stop motion
where it is frame-by-frame work,
trying to tell a story using a more hands-on version of special effects.
So, I've come up here to talk about film-making and I can go on and on
about software and lighting and stories,
but to me, film-making is strategic compilation
when the words and the story and the visuals all match,
you feel like you can be at the brink of genius.
It doesn't take much to get a good mood going in my videos.
I play my visuals along to match whatever that may be,
I get my music going and I start speaking my voiceover.
Now, the details to how I create my movies start off very simple.
I simply walk around, I have my notebook, and my camera and I live life.
The majority of the time, my eyes are the best lenses that I have.
I can create countless movies and storylines
and whole entire worlds inside my mind like we all do.
For me, I sit back and I just watch.
I tilt my head to create the angles,
I blur and focus my eyes to create the Iens flares
and I position myself to get the shot just right
and the actors and the characters,
they're just the strangers living their lives.
The hardest part for me is making the movies that you guys can see as well.
Everyone is brilliant.
Everyone can be a genius but a body is a machine.
A machine that produces a product, needs to be used.
You need to turn it on regularly and for me, I do that with creativity and art.
I stimulate my body so that I can produce more and more.
A journal; I have a journal that I bring around everyday.
This is my means of writing down my thoughts and no matter where I am
and if I do not produce a video for months, I am being creative in this format.
I am just writing and writing.
Now, I am a very personal person.
I like going down and looking people in the eye and telling them how I am
and what my day is and that is something I really pride myself in my videos.
I like being honest. I like telling people my perspective.
That is what comes from my journal.
My film scripts are straight off my poetry and how I am and what I've been doing.
I don't just love the camera; I love the paint brush and the mind
and the body and I love the pencil and the pen,
the voice and the music and all of this combined.
All I am doing is trying to find my best way to express my thoughts.
It can be through all sorts of mediums.
For me, film is one that I particularly like the best.
I can be considered excessively creative sometimes;
I take on way too many projects than I can handle
but I can see myself making films for the rest of my life.
So as a student, I just decided to start the rest of my life.
I'm a student with very different priorities.
School, I sometimes see as an extracurricular activity
and I'm fine with that; that is my personal choice.
And seeing art as a priority
is the most stressful thing I've taken on so far
while having to sit in class for five days a week.
Art and being this film-maker and this creator,
is something that has torn me apart.
But it's being this creator and this artist that builds me up.
I create my own ladders. I love to climb.
I take on way too many projects and art and I'm a very happy and positive person,
but the problem is the further and further you climb up the ladder,
the more and more you put on yourself,
the further and further there is to fall down.
I get stressed a lot.
Like all of us students and grown-ups, whatever age you are,
people are going to get stressed
and that goes for the happiest people on Earth, and the saddest.
It doesn't matter what state you're going to get overwhelmed.
I personally flood myself with work.
That's something I love to do, but it gets overwhelming like all of you know.
The thing is, that for me, I find the view from the top of this ladder,
the most satisfying and it's definitely worth it.
If I'm lucky, I will cry once a week from all my stress and anxiety
and it'll just be like watering a garden.
That's what I just needed to say, "Look, you're overwhelmed,
but you're overwhelmed because you are living too much
and I love getting overwhelmed by the right kind of things."
So, as the storyteller, as myself Sonia, my goal in life is to collect the stories
of unsuspecting, miraculous people.
Now, I wrote this around a summer ago, this goal for my life
and I just see myself doing that now
and what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I feel like all of us are walking around with these strange and beautiful stories
and I am just dying to hear --
I just want to dive myself into what these people are holding in their minds.
Everyone out here, all these audience members,
all these people watching this online,
we all have these stories where billions of lives
that other people didn't even know existed, but like all of us, we have memories,
we have relationships, we fall in love, we fall apart, we have faults and miracles
and we're all living, we're all breathing, and I think that's what I want to do,
is just learn what makes us all human, and if film is one of those ways to say it
if it's through poetry, through art, through anything, that's what I want to do.
But it's not only the artist's job. It's all of our jobs.
We have these incredible, miraculous lives that all of us want to hear,
all of us want to be comforted by the fact what makes us human.
So, it's all of our jobs, to tell our stories and I think,
all of us just want to be a part of whatever our generation or our generations
are going to leave behind;
we're going to leave something great behind.
We don't know what it's going to be yet and maybe parts of it has,
but together, let us make this universal dictionaries of things
that have never been defined.
I want to end with a quote.
It's by Walt Whitman and it goes:
"That you are here -- that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."
So contribute; contribute in any language you want
and together, we will let this powerful play go on, and tell our own stories.
Thank you.
(Applause)