Chaos and Creativity

We’ve all been there. Stuck in traffic, running late, woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Caught a mood from somebody else. Barista didn’t quite get your morning coffee right. And what started as a crap moment begins to seem like a crap day, a crap week, a crap life. You. Are. Spiraling. You know you might pull other people in with you. What happens next? In this minisode, Kimi and Lou share their secret inner sages’ insights into pulling out of emotional tailspins before minor mood changes...

If you look at map of Los Angeles, you’ll see where I used to live on Kittyhawk Avenue is in close proximity the airport. There was a hide-a-key near the back door. If you knew me, or knew someone who knew me, you were welcome to stay— on the couch if I was in town, or in the bedroom if I was out of town. If you stayed more than two nights, compensation was a bottle of wine or bourbon. That included epic breakfasts if I didn’t have an early call time on any given morning. Another quality of m...

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve just arrived home from another sophomore day at a new high school I started attending only a few weeks earlier. Melding into this new society as an outsider isn’t going poorly, but it has its challenges. On the turntable of my father’s hi-fi is the just released album Moving Pictures from Rush. The opening song Tom Sawyer, a song about individualism, personal autonomy, and refusing to conform to society's expectations becomes my guide and my light du...

In this week’s minisode: Lou offers to write a treatment for a screenplay with a spectacular premise and a really good story. Kimi randomly gets cast in a short film and is relieved when it gets canceled. Drawing on decades of experience as creative professionals, Kimi and Lou share how to ask the right questions when given the “opportunity” to work for free, when trade feels like a valuable exchange, when saying yes is stupid, and how to say no when it needs to be said. Connect with th...

Until I met three time academy award nominee Tom Myers, it never crossed my mind that a blank page to a writer is total silence to a sound designer. That something as subtle as a dog barking in the distance in a movie is as intentional a choice as the more conspicuous murmuring of a populated cafe underneath the dialog of actors in a scene. The deeper Myers and I dug into what he does for a living at Skywalker Sound, the more I realized that sound design and sound mixing are forms of aural ma...