By Ashley Johnson/reporter
The second session of the NW Creative Voice Symposium began with Jonathan Kurth’s Sports Inspires Greatness.
Kurth said “sports teaches us to never give up” while recalling the 2008 Olympics when it seemed the U.S. swim team was barely holding on to second place in the 4×100-meter relay.
“But out of nowhere, [anchor Jason] Lezak began to swim as fast as he could and ended up taking first place,” he said. “A lot of times in life, you get down and you have to fight through that and swim to the top. Metaphorically, Lezak swam to the top, and he got that gold medal.”
Dallas Mavericks player Dirk Nowitzki also taught valuable lessons, Kurth said.
“This is what I created from the inspiration I’ve received from people such as Dirk Nowitzki, to never give up,” he said.
In his presentation on marijuana, student John Edward Menger said, “I used to smoke, not regularly, but I enjoyed it with friends. It interested me. It’s an interesting plant.”
To illustrate, Menger had created a painting, “A Rose for Life,” that centers on a red rose with marijuana leaves and three stems leading out, one into the flower, another becomes an IV pole leading down into a cancer patient because THC has been shown to reduce tumor size and cancer cells, he said.
The third stem leads into a business crane because of the large amount of money the U.S. would bring in as a result of legalizing marijuana sales.
The background is black with a mask in the shadows, symbolic of the government, he said.
“The whole idea of the painting is very dark, but the rose is lighter, symbolic of a brighter future due to the positive aspects if this plant were legalized, ” Menger said.
In Technology Behind Film, Everett Hoffman said his inspiration for film editing came from a YouTube channel that he discovered last summer.
Hoffman showed one of the channel’s slow, intense action scenes and some of his own film and raw footage before editing. He pointed out the editing techniques in the film, such as color quality and grading.
“Color affects your emotions,” he said. “Movies are edited to draw emotion from the audience.”
Ben Heasley recited his poem “The Embrace,” which he was inspired to write after the deaths of three family members.
“They were my inspiration, so I wrote a dense poem based off of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” he said.
Matthew Bruce challenged the audience to take what they know about music and throw it out of the window in his presentation How Do You Define Music.
When he played band in high school, the members would start jam sessions on the bus by using seats and various other items as instruments, he said.
“Real music is not about what’s popular,” he said. “It’s about what the artists can convey through their emotions.”
In How Jazz Has Impacted the Past, the Present and the Future, Rafael Bustamante and Matt Swango played an improvisational jazz piece on their saxophones.
“Jazz can move a culture,” Swango said. “It’s an expression of what you have to say. You don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules.”
