We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Masa Gibson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Masa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
During the height of the pandemic, I started experimenting with making music with bottles, playing them both as woodwinds and as percussion. After a lot of trial and error, I developed a process of recording and layering all different sounds into full-on musical pieces. Sometimes I added vocals, too. It was solitary, laborious, and meditative. This was my sourdough bread.
Fast-forward a couple of years. With a couple of full-fledged pieces under my belt, I felt inspired to branch out and compose a piece for bottles and soprano. With help from some friends in Iceland, I set some text from an Icelandic poem to a melody for the soprano. I reached out to my friend and professional singer, Kathleen Cantrell, to sing the soprano part. The finished track felt so visually evocative that I felt compelled to shoot a music video for it.
Together with Abby J. Smith, who is my partner in life as well as in creative projects, I shot the video in bits over a few months with the support of members of our co-op building, which is full of artists and art lovers. Our neighbor Chris Tanner, who is a working artist and theatre performer, starred in the video, and we shot in our other neighbors’ apartments, the basement of the building, and the local community garden. Neighbors donated props, wardrobe, and lighting equipment. For one shot, we had a wine-and-pizza night and a bunch of people came over and painted lines on Chris’s bare chest. For the climactic shot of the piece, a college friend donated his time and his drone on a brisk February day at the beach to help us shoot Chris from above.
The resulting piece, a five-minute visual-musical tone poem (titled “Where did the days of your life lose their color?) played on a loop in Chris’s solo gallery show for a month in 2024. Because some of Chris’s paintings were featured in the video, visitors to the gallery would walk through the show and experience his work firsthand before watching the video in the back of the gallery, where those same paintings—as well as Chris himself—were recontextualized for them.
I classify myself as a true introvert, often content to putter around in solitude. And yet, as an artist of limited means I often rely on support and contributions from others to help me realize creative visions. More than that, I thrive creatively on collaboration with others. This project, which began as a single-minded, solitary pursuit, evolved into a bridge, like the Bifröst from old Icelandic mythology, that carried me out of the thick of the pandemic back into my community and the art world at large.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
In college I studied linguistics, music, and physics before continuing on to earn a Ph.D. in linguistics. I fell backwards into filmmaking after getting into acting and then feeling drawn to the other side of the camera. Acting in a bunch of local short films provided a free education as well as a network of friends with technical skills and access to equipment. I started dipping my toe into writing and directing, relying on those friends for help with camera, lights, sound, and post-production. But I was always soaking it all up, asking questions and watching and listening, and I started getting comfortable with shot planning and editing. I also brought my skills from other disciplines to bear on the craft, both on the practical side and on the creative side. When it came to sound editing and mixing, my knowledge of acoustics from linguistics and physics lowered the barrier to entry. On the creative side, I made use of my musical training to score some films, and for one short I invented a fictional language for the characters to speak.
My partner Abby and I rarely secure full funding for our creative pursuits, so I’ve fallen into a habit of exploiting available resources as jumping-off points for projects, whether that means writing a script around an unusual location or a prop we have for free, or fabricating an interesting prop cheaply (Abby’s specialty), or even just recontextualizing otherwise mundane objects or locations. This sort of oblique way of approaching storytelling—creativity born out of constraints—results in finished products that are… kind of weird! Or let’s say… off-center of conventional. Often people, including me, don’t know how to categorize the work. Experimental? Narrative? Music video? Silent film? Sci-fi? Fantasy?
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
As a baseline, I just want to make something original that holds the viewer’s attention, even just for a moment, and then leaves them with something. When I hear myself say it out loud like that, it sounds like a low bar, but it’s easier said than done! As we all know, phone cameras, social media, and streaming services have democratized filmmaking, but they have also made it harder to grab someone and hold their attention. How do we do that? People talk about filmmaking as a storytelling craft, but for me it’s enough for it to evoke a sensation, to stir something in your nervous system. And if there is a story, the story itself doesn’t necessarily need to be novel or original if it’s delivered in an innovative way. Like… serving beer in a soup bowl.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Of course, it’s rewarding to go to a festival and see the work on a big screen with a live audience. As an actor, I’ve performed in live theatre, and in some ways, the experience of being a filmmaker at a screening of one’s own work is similar to acting for a live audience. Even though the actual making of the thing has happened in the past, I still have this sensation of generating it from within myself and projecting it onto that screen in real time as the audience takes it in.
All that said, I equally love the process itself—collaborating with other creatives, making discoveries in the moment and incorporating them into the work. And, as I mentioned earlier, being forced to make creative choices while shackled by circumstantial or self-imposed constraints. Ultimately, the most addicting aspect of this craft is having an internal vision and then cultivating it into a reality. I like to use that word—”cultivating”—because the end product is the result not only of that initial seed of an idea, but also of contributions from other people and external forces. And yet, inevitably, there is a mystical sense in which that finished product is somehow exactly as I had imagined from the start.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://masagibson.com
- Instagram: @masagibs
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/masagibson
- Other: https://vimeo.com/masagibson
Image Credits
Abby J. Smith
Masa Gibson
Jeff Hodges