I started out doing music videos and photography, and I always loved writing. Filmmaking seemed to be a good compilation of all these skills in a way that allowed me to tell a story “greater than the sum of its parts.”
I started doing non-surf stuff like commercials, short films, and music videos and just started expanding my filmmaking that way. I started doing that more for a career: you know, it was paying the bills, and it was challenging. I was stimulated by it.
My two favorite parts of what I do are definitely writing the music and then writing and directing the videos to support each song. As well as doing my own makeup and styling for the videos.
I said to my team, 'I'm doing 'Gilmore Girls' no matter what. There's no way I'll miss it,' because I owed it to the story. The story is bigger than the sum of its parts.
My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.
To me an anthology gives meaning to the phrase, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Even if those individual parts are really f-ing hot.
When I worked as a music and fashion photographer, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't using my skills productively. I gave up photography - I walked away from it completely - and started doing care work.
I've always been taught that basketball is a team game and greater than the sum of its parts.
I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.
In a studio context, the music becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When you have collaboration, you have other people's strengths that I don't share, so my song can get stronger.
When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.
When I get to tell a story through music videos or TV, it's all about finding the story that I want to tell, so I'm definitely open to acting roles, it just depends on the story.
But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed
As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
If I was a young director starting off, there's so many tools at your disposal now to do things relatively inexpensively that it's a great time to learn your chops and do some cool music videos. If I started all over again, I'd still be doing music videos, I'd just be doing them very differently. It's very difficult for me to do them now, but for young kids out there that love music and want to tackle a different art form - and I do think music video is an art form - that's a very cool thing to do.
A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.