Tapping Creativity

'What I learnt from directing the movie Caged is that your movie is only as good as your weakest scene. So you have to fight to make sure that none of the scenes is terribly bad.'
~Aaron Fjellman

Aaron Fjellman is an American writer and director.  Recently, he made his feature film debut with Caged, a psychological thriller about the horrific, mind bending effects of solitary confinement.  The film stars Edi Gathegi (X-men First Class), Melora Hardin (The Office), and Angela Sarafyan (Westworld). 

Born and raised in Southern California, he attended film school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After college, he moved back to Los Angeles and began his career as a director, working on music videos, commercials, and digital shorts with an array of American and European clients. His short-form work garnered opportunities to travel the world, forging significant friendships and loyal business partners along the way.  A boyhood infatuation with genre filmmaking influences his project choices and distinct visual style to this day.  Little did he know that an obsession with pop culture’s dark side would one day fuse with his desire to promote meaningful social change through art.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

How do you make your creativity, something that's not just about yourself? But something that you can involve a broader community in?

I've had to ask myself these questions. Can I find people who are a little bit better than me or peers, mostly who trust me enough to be able to come and say, 'I'm gonna be totally honest with you about this thing.' They could be off the wall.  I've got another friend who is ADD and has no patience. And so I he'll be like, 'This script is boring. I didn't get through it. It was too boring. ' Even just that feedback tells me something.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

"As creatives, the time that we spend is sometimes incredibly fruitful and sometimes not fruitful at all, one of the things that I was able to fall back onto was rhythm. And practice, when you don't have the strength inside of you to kind of keep going. If you have a rhythm, the rhythm allows you to keep going..."

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

At the beginning of a creative project, so many of us (and I am super, super guilty of this) end up finding ourselves imagining the project completed. We imagine the accolades. In part because we’ve been taught that complete is somehow better than incomplete. Therefore, when something's incomplete it is lacking. Which is true in some ways – but that’s only part of the story.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

"Sometimes you need things to line up. But when they're not lining up, you have to say, well, what's in my power at this moment that I can do? And I think that's really important for artists, particularly anyone who's struggling at some point. At any point where there's a blockage of some type it's important to say, yeah, there are all these reasons why I can't do something, but what can I do right now?

Whether it's an issue of time like, I've got a full time job, and I'm a single mom, great, you have limited time. What do you get to fit into those tiny little windows, because if you brush your teeth, and you check Facebook, it means you actually do have time, although it might not feel like enough at first."

~Jessica Care Moore.

She is the founder and CEO of Moore Black Press, the executive producer of Black Women Rock. And founder of the literacy driven Jessica Care Moore Foundation.

She is an internationally renowned poet, playwright, performance artist and producer who has won numerous awards. She has published numerous books. And her works have been published additionally, in numerous literary collections, as well as she has performed on stages all over the world, including some very exciting places, the Apollo Theater, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her most recent book is 'We Want Our Bodies Back' published by HarperCollins.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

Reading back on the biographies of luminaries like Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, one thing that great thinkers and artists have done is given themselves R&R time. Time to just rest and relax. But in American (or modern Western society), there’s a cultural imperative to push, push, push. Get stuff done. Prove your value, prove your worth, get more money, get more fame, get more glory. We then actually devalue this other time - this time to chill.

Let’s talk about the trade off of time, particularly as it relates to creative work. 

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

You gotta choose a creative project to sink your teeth into. And then when you do, you need to start making choices - what sentence to write, what rhyme to cut. And you might add the wrong thing and cut out the part that was great. 

I have scripts that I've written, that are just not great. But I had to put it out there and then went back and did a whole rewrite, and then it got a little bit better, and then did a whole rewrite. But I couldn't have gotten to the fifth rewrite, that's pretty good, unless I did the first draft that was bad.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

If you have only one idea, and it's the basket you put all of your eggs into, you're actually not an artist, you're not a creative. The song that you wrote three years ago, is three years old. Put it out there, do the work continually to get better, and keep moving forward. Do what makes you feel alive, share what you have created with whoever you can, and then go make more of it.

Written and Produced by Matthew C. Temple
Edited by Tyen Musa
Original Theme Music by Adrian Lee

ABOUT ME
I started my career as an accidental filmmaker. I wrote a “practice script,”  hoping one day I could write one that I could sell or produce. That script became my first film, “Senses of Place,” which went on to win awards on the film festival circuit and was distributed by FilmBuff. 

I then moved to Hollywood where I eventually made nine feature films, eight documentaries, and worked with actors Carrie-Anne Moss, Melora Hardin , Zac Efron, Edi Gathegi and Angela Sarafyan in this year's Caged, and many more. I've worked with producers Kevin Costner, Bill Borden – Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated director Mike Johnson. I have even shared the screen with Josh Brolin, Neil Patrick Harris, Kane Hodder, Naveen Andrews, and many more.

Last year, I released the documentary film, “Hardball: The Girls of Summer.” Currently, I live between California and East Africa, writing and developing new projects, while consulting on film and TV projects. 

Visit my website to see my work – or check me out on IMDb.com

Creativity is by definition ‘creating something from nothing’. And historically or mythologically speaking, creators have been gods and goddesses. So by being creators, creatives artists, we are actually taking on divine work. And that's pretty serious stuff. And we know that inspiration and the flow that brings, you know, creativity to life is something that we have to kindle within ourselves. But we don't get all the fuel from within ourselves. And that's where we can actually go outside and find others to offer us insight, inspiration, and some wisdom or support. 

Welcome to the podcast here cracking creativity with myself, Matthew C. Temple, and each week, we're going to dive into questions and issues and inspiration around creativity in the creative process. And once a month, I will be joined by a guest, someone who has actually found a way to have a thriving creative process and they can share with us what works for them what doesn't we get to get a little bit of insight and wisdom from those who are successful and or who are also having their own struggles and have come before us that can offer us something as well. So I look forward to spending time with you. Make sure while you're here right now and thinking about it, go ahead and subscribe so that when we release each week's episode, you will be the first to know and if you like what you see, or you think you're gonna like what you see, go ahead and give us a thumbs up or give us a rating and make sure to spread the love. Look forward to having you with me. We'll see you soon.