I’ve always loved watching film credits, especially in the movie theater. I am unbothered by their plainness and length, composed of ambiguous titles and names. Rather, I enjoy speculating the significance of each name that made its way to the screen. As the carefully formatted sequences of letters steadily scroll down the gigantic screen, I wonder what it took for the person to make their way to a “major motion picture.” I wonder how their parents might react when they see their kid amongst the cluster of other unfamiliar names. I wonder how each name has influenced the sound and imageries of the film.
It must be a dream of many filmmakers to have their creation be “critically acclaimed” by Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB, or even better, be nominated for or win an Oscar. If any of these were achieved, declared loudly by the many reviews and awards spread out on the movie poster, an additional inquiry of mine would be: what steps did they take to acquire such claim, that their work managed to please such a wide range of audiences bearing significant differences in culture and history?
I wonder what it takes for me to create something that pampers the crowd, making them laugh or bringing them to tears?
You’d be starting off on the wrong foot if your goal from the outset was to appease the crowd. It turns out the key to making it to the film credits is to be a nerd. Here, I define a nerd as someone who loves what they are doing. The term, in no way, insinuates a negative connotation that the subject is trapped in their own small world, fixated on topics of unfamiliarity. It is, however, a title of revolt (a topic constantly emphasized by my education at Oxy) and resilience in defending something niche with the sheer hope that it might impact a stranger.
This is what I learned from the creators of the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (EEAAO). “The Daniels,” directors and writers of EEAAO, ended up using a 5-person team, led by Oxy’s prestigious alum Zak Stoltz, to process “almost 500 visual effects shots.”
According to Stoltz in the interview, having such a minuscule VFX team is rather unheard of, but they still pushed the production forward during the pandemic in their garage and ended up making the Everything Bagel notorious worldwide. Before the Daniels and Stoltz visited Oxy in April 2023, I wrote an opinion discussing EEAAO’s unofficial distribution via proxy/pirate websites in China, as mainstream movie theaters were not permitted to screen it. When autographing the printed copy of my article, Daniel Scheinert (one of “the Daniels”) said he was glad that their movie made its way to the Chinese audience. Scheinert’s simple words were a tribute to the borderless appreciation of art, and they affirmed my continuous effort in manifesting Chinese netizens’ various attempts to overcome communication barriers.
Another significant instance at Oxy that glorified nerdiness for me was in association with tea — not tea as in gossip, but actual tea that’s grown in a small town called Meitan in Guizhou, China. This tea is fertilized with pig feces, fermented and kneaded via a thorough and well-disciplined procedure.
Towards the end of Fall 2022, I was given the opportunity to work as a student research assistant, investigating the history of Chinese tea farming for Professor Alexander Day from Oxy’s Asian Studies Department. I was fascinated by the hundreds of pages of archives that document the slightest changes in tea cultivation. In my conversations with Professor Day, I shared discoveries from sifting through decades-old handwritten documents.
I began to realize that a spark of interest can emerge from the most unexpected, even trivial, moments. Once that spark is fueled by genuine passion and curiosity, it grows into something unstoppable, and ultimately, deeply rewarding. This reward, shaped entirely by your own intention and investment, is what makes being a nerd so fascinating.
I will end this last piece I write for The Occidental as an undergraduate student with a brief commentary on creativity, the very factor that draws many en route, destined to be etched into the film credits. Being creative, in the form of writing, photographing, video-making and so on, means producing something that will be permanently owned by you. It is this sense of ownership that builds up the foundation of pride, whereas compliments from others are secondary, even ceremonial. Creating means your very mind and body have finally agreed upon a coalition, where they collaborate to process your thoughts and ideas into solid and material forms. Your body—which has long been trapped in the contextual understanding of biology, where it is perceived as a machine that enforces homeostasis, a process that’s solely dedicated to keeping you alive (in the organic sense) — is what provides you with the primary form of validation.
Fellow Tigers, being in the film credits means that success is never meant to be a terminal achievement (although the concept of success is commonly associated with college graduations). Rather, film credits carry the temporality that not only validates your current accomplishments, but it is also something that can be recurring in distinct projects, published at different times, following your own nerdy pace.
Contact Renee Ye at rye@oxy.edu
