When I first started making music, it was learning other people's songs and putting them onto four-track. Like Beatles songs and stuff. When I started writing, I used the singing side of the production as a vehicle for melody and lyrical ideas.
Well I like everything but my first love has always been piano because when I started out there was a piano in my house and it was there so I just started tinkling on it really so it's always been my first love.
I started singing for The Phantom in January, and we started filming in October and I sang all the way through to the next June. In fact, I was singing for about two months before I even knew I had the role.
I started, obviously, doing theater, and I always thought that I would; in a way, I always thought that I'd be a theater actor. When I was starting out, I didn't really plan on making films, actually.
With Net Neutrality, the level playing field that gave us Google, YouTube and eBay when they were start-ups would suddenly start to tilt in favor of the big, established players.
The things that I've done that have totally been remembered, they've always started with the same kind of engine, they've always started with someone saying 'I have to make this film - I'm going to make this film whatever the odds'.
At first it was a bit daunting, but once I started to do it, the more I got into it, the more I started enjoying it and being able to say things lyrically that I would normally have to say musically.
The lyrics came out of necessity. When we started writing the record, we started in a more fusion environment and that got boring really quick and that wasn't what we were about on an organic level.
In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.
A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once.
It's hard if you start believing that you should be really that perfect fantasy ideal, that people start believing because of all of the retouching. You can delve into that fantasy world and play with it, but when you walk away, that's not you.
I found school quite tough, but Saturday night was movie night, and I started to empathise with the characters on screen. I started to get more involved with what these people were experiencing. Film inspired me to do better.
Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.
When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.
It's almost like he's started to sound even more exotic the more people started doing him. I don't know why, but there's just something about Al Gore that makes me laugh.
Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.
It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that's a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing wit...
The drawing of a 'Pipeline Wave' started with Billabong as a commission for their 2009 Pipeline Masters campaign. My 'Pipeline Wave' drawing later became the start of my 'Waterworks Collection' for gallery prints.
