Lesson 2: Comment a Movie

This week I've watched a Japanese movie entitled Sakuran, literally means Cherryblossom Chaos also been known as The Rebellious Oiran.

The film taks about a girl, Kiyoha who is sold at a very young age into the red-light district and is put under the care of the oiran of Tamagiku House, Shohi.

In feudal Japan, Oiran is a number one ranking of all the courtesans and they were entertainers rather than simply sex worker known as yujo. It's like celebrities at that time and have huge influence on wealthy family especially on fashion sense.

Due to her rebellious nature, the leader of the household has foreseen her potential to become a great oiran since an oiran not only need beauty and talent, but also the tenacity to maintain their position, and she did proved the prediction to be true when she become the most famous oiran at that time. But reaching this position also means that she must walk through a heartbroken life with her swearing not to fall in love on any man again since she was betrayed and abandoned by the first man she loved dearly.

Besides the distinctive character, the director has used a special way to capture the glamorous and luxurious life of an oiran. Absolutely amazing cinematography.

Continue reading...

Creative Studies: Lesson 2

Creativity, Innovation, Invention, Novelty

This week, we are given a task to define words creativity, innovation, invention and novelty. First, I'm going to define the words creativity. According to the lecture's lesson, creativity is the generation of new ideas or a new way of doing things. While according to wikipedia, it defines creativity as "a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight."

All these four words are closely related to one another. Each of them plays an important role in completing the next process. It began with invention, a process of making a new composition, device, or process. An invention may be derived from a pre-existing model or idea, or it could be independently conceived in which case it may be a radical breakthrough. In addition, there is cultural invention, which is an innovative set of useful social behaviors adopted by people and passed on to others. Inventions often extend the boundaries of human knowledge or experience. A good inventions requires creativity to make that creation possess the quality of novelty in order for that specific creation to last through the time and useful. Novelty, as define in wikipedia is the quality of being new. Although it may be said to have an objective dimension it essentially exists in the subjective perceptions of individuals. It also refers to something novel; that which is striking, original or unusual. The term can have pejorative sense and refer to a mere innovation.

I've heard about a statement stating that only people involved in art industry needs to be creative which is a statement that I not fully agreed to. In my opinion, all career and profession requires creativity that distinguishes their professions from the others. For example, a doctor needs to be creative in order to develop new medicines or treatments that can treat some of the deadliest diseases in the world. People might think that the medical field is all about facts and static theory and that they only need to master all those theory to excelled in this field but in fact it is not. The facts maybe something that have been fixed for many years, but there might be hundreds and thousands of ways to applicate it.

Speaking of developing new ideas and creations, many of the creation and ideas in nowadays are not really 100% new. Many of these ideas are evolved and upgraded from existing ideas, which is also known as a process called innovation. As stated on wikipedia, innovation is a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful". It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. I've always seen innovation as an important quality that every industry must have in them to ensure the survival of their industry as the revolution of the time continued. Lacking the quality of innovation will leave one industry being forgotten and existed only in the history just like many huge company that once monopoly the whole indsutry.

Continue reading...

Lesson 1: Comment A Movie

First week of the creative studies class, we were free to talk about any topic that we feel related to the word creative. As what I feel, I think that movies is the source of my creative ideas. So this week I choose to talk about a a movie which tells a stroy of a dark fairytale, Pan's Labyrinth.

This is a Spanish fairytale that happened in 1944, 5 years after the Spanish Civil War. The main character is a 10 years old girl name Ofelia who's mother was remarried to a Captain Vidal who hunts down the communist at that time. Ofelia and her mother moved to her stepfather's military station deep in the jungle to wait for her mother to deliver her young brother. Here, Ofelia started to encounter weird incidents and creatures when she accidentally enter an abandoned labyrinth. In here, she meet a strange creature known as the Faun who addressed Ofelia as the lost princess of the Underworld, this labyrinth served as a door to the Underworld and he was the guide to wait as lead her back to the Underworld kingdom. In return, Ofelia must succeed to complete 3 tasks in order to prove her eligibility as the Underworld princess.

In this movie, I can see the wish and what hopes of different kinds of human beings who live during the period of war. Whether is the pride that the Captain Vidal strongly holds to live up to his father's expectations, or the simplest hope of a little girl who wish to escape the cruel reality of the world, this movie shows that in that time, everyone has a labyrinth in their heart that they wish to escape to. It also depicts the emotions and desperate of child who lived in the time of war, desperate to help the people they love but the helplessness of being too small to help others force them to escape to a fantasy world.

In the end, Ofelia tried to escape with his baby brother, but the labyrinth is still shut. She had nowhere to run and eventually shot to death by his stepfather. Her blood which drips down to the labyrinth triggers it to open. It is said that Ofelia's act of defying the last quest to kill his brother and instead sacrificing her own life proves the purity of her heart and thus fulfill the last quest allowig her to go back to the Underworld while in the real world, she died. This scene always makes me think of the child who lived in war zone, as if the ending of this movie is what they see and hope for when they innocently died from the attacks around them.

Continue reading...

Creative studies: Lesson 1

Defining Creative

This is the first blog assignment for the course Creative Studies MLC 1013. In this assignment we are being requested to post a photo of a person who is creative or a person who is doing some creative things and then elaborate and explain the reason of why we think it is creative. Since this considered as the lecture is being delivered starting from this week I considered this as the first class. Currently, I'm not quite sure what this class about, and it seems to me pretty much like the Media Culture and Media Appreciation class the previous semesters. But I'll try to understand it as much as possible.





I personally have been a fan of handmade products for since I read a book about Taiwan artists who love to make handmade products so much that some of them are even willing to resigned from high salary job to achieved their dream which is considered as something meaningless among ordinary people.

Their passion soon awaken other talented people around the world who bore the same dream as they do. More and more people in Malaysia are participating in this event. There are so many creative market and fairs being held especially in Kuala Lumpur since the past 3 years. Seeing what they are doing reminds me of a few important points mentioned in the creative studies class. One of the point mentioned is that only special talented people are creative which is not quite true as we can see from these artists, people always sees them possessing remarkable creativity and outstanding skills in what they are doing but the truth is though they possessed ability and creativity higher than average people but they also work much more harder than we think they do. Almost all of these artists only starts to work on their products after they came home from office work like other regular people. Though exhausted and tired from the long hour work, they still continues to work on the things they like, putting lots of efforts in creating the intricate details in their work. And during weekends and public holidays, they are not resting too. They will gather up all the products they have made and sell them or participating local art fairs and creative markets.

There's also one thing I learned from them is that they always hold tight to a principle of always upgrading their skills and designs to make improvements to their current dedsigns and also sharing their knowledge and designs with one another. They prove to other people that the idea that we have to have brand new ideas to be considered as creative is incorrect. In fact, many of the creative ideas are developed from existing ideas with the difference that the designer innovate the designs to improve it or developed a new products with the ideas derived from an old designs. Taking an example, what makes these artists special from one another is the way they incorporate designs that is so significate that people are able to identify their design by just one look. The design can be just a motif of a kitten, but the way modify and adding details to the cat to make it special is not something easy but also requires quite an amount of creativity.

Continue reading...