The Current: A Creative Story

By Mo Hill, Creative Corner Editor

This past week I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Jamie O’Neil. He is a longtime member of the digital media arts department (DMA) here at Canisius and is a very passionate creative known for projects in the Buffalo area and beyond. O'Neil's interest in digital media began prior to college, where he studied technical theatre. “I graduated high school and went to BU (Boston University) and at that time I was interested in technical theatre because computers hadn’t been invented yet so like lights, sound, costumes, masks, like that kind of stuff. You know it was very exciting because very quickly while I was in college and I was in Boston, Mac world started to appear and my friends were getting into computers and I was like ‘maybe I should get into this.’” Soon after graduation he began working for a small digital media boutique in Boston, where he worked for about a year. Shortly after he moved to New York City and began working for a firm on Fifth Avenue as a freelance videographer, “When I was working in New York I was a freelancer and I had a contract to work with an ad firm on 5th Avenue as their video guy.” 

Once 9/11 happened, O’Neil realized that a change of direction was needed in his life, and that he had several opportunities in front of him. “That was the signal in life for me, that I needed to do something different. I was in Buffalo on that day but it was just frightening and all of the work dried up for this firm because it was all in the financial industry. I spent years developing a whole bunch of clients in Buffalo, and eventually I thought, ‘I really want to be a professor.’” Prior to working at Canisius, he intended to work at a school in Chicago, then the offer came to him to work at Canisius, “The opportunity came to stay here and make Buffalo our permanent home and I just embraced that.” Throughout his career, O’Neil has helped design visual effects for concerts, participated in several festivals and conventions as an independent creator, made music and even participated in medical research. 

O'Neil's biggest motivator as an educator is the students themselves. It’s the reactions that he hears when someone figures out a new technique in Photoshop or something new that a member of his research team introduces to him. This stems from the impact that his own teachers had on him during his education on all levels from middle school to graduate school– “I could tell all the stories of the professors I had that made me want to be a professor. I had some blockbuster professors both in grad and undergrad, like really, really incredible professors. They just made me want to do it, but that came much later for me.” Prior to becoming a professor he spent about ten years in the industry, working in those aforementioned firms but also spending a lot of time in creative galleries and other spaces, which provided a non-normative place to express himself. Now as a professor he looks to provide spaces like those to his students. O’Neil believes that DMA as a topic is open to everyone, regardless of major, and that it allows them to take a path in their major that they can’t take without having that knowledge on digital media, “I guess the way that I would put it is that media doesn’t have content, so when I have a biology major who is interested in DMA, I’m always like, “Well great, take it as a dual major,” because there is all this incredible science that you can bring and express to people through digital media.” 

He explored the possibilities of digital media for people of all backgrounds and interests, as well as the possibilities that creativity as a topic has in general. He describes creativity as something that is almost self autonomous, it has its own creativity, can lead you down many different paths in life that you otherwise wouldn’t expect to go down, and that is something that is in essence unique to creativity– “It’s like a river and you’re starting to get into the current of it, and all of these other people are getting pulled into it.” Creativity is a fluid thing that is constantly changing and developing, and it’s something that can and should be tapped into by anyone, regardless of their field.

If you’re interested in reading the full interview, please see below! Expect to see more from Jamie O’Neil and other creative professors and students on campus throughout the academic year.

The Interview:

M: My first question is pretty simple, what motivates you to help others unlock their creative side, what motivates you to help others unlock their creative potential?

J: That’s a real easy one. The thing that is most motivating is the students themselves. The very best part of my job is how the students act as the wind beneath my creative wings. I get a lot of creative motivation from the students themselves. Nothing is more energizing than seeing students who are psyched to learn photoshop, or work with video, or do something cool with 3D or advanced software. It's funny because I’ve done this for a long time, and that is not the case when you’re in the field. It might seem like a dream job to be shooting commercials at an advertising agency, but you’re really pressed with deadlines, and your creativity is contained in the deliverable as opposed to the process. What’s very motivating for me is teaching is to connect to someone’s discovery of something new. I have a couple of students who I tell “Don’t let anyone squash that enthusiasm,” because they just burst out in class sometimes. They’re so excited about something like some tool that we’re learning in motion graphics, and it’s funny because they vocalize it like, “Oh my god this is so cool!” And that’s why I keep coming back because to me it isn’t that cool anymore, but to see someone in that moment doing that, it’s worth it. Then with my research group, they are doing stuff that I have that reaction. So they are like “look at what we figured out.” And I’m like, “Oh my god that’s so cool!” So the big thing is the students. 

M: That was great, and it actually moves into my next question perfectly. What do you find to be the most interesting about Digital Media Arts? Just the general field of graphic design and everything else that we do in the program, what do you find most interesting about it?J: We do graphic design and we do web design. We also do filmmaking, both commercial filmmaking and fictional filmmaking. And then what we always call game design is really 3D visualization. So with VR and with so many things that are happening, say with AI, there is this incredible conversion of “the real” to “the virtual.” Even on the level of identity. So the broad virtualization of our identity, which is deep. The difference between image and identity was one of our first lessons. How we understand ourselves through a media or mediated image of ourselves is profound. It used to be our life and our “digital life,” but now there’s our digital life and then we remember “Oh yeah, my actual life.” You really don’t think about life, you think about digital life and you spend your time in that. I think that’s really fascinating and we do a really great job of that with Dr. Snyder too and her scholarship. I tried to do that in Digital Culture and I did it as long as I could and I loved it, but we’ve got some people who really understand that, like Dr. Snyder. 

M: It’s interesting too because there are so many movies about it, right? I’ve seen so many animated and live action movies dedicated to virtual identity, like the movie “Ready Player One” is a great example and it explores that and now that we’re seeing it in reality, it’s kinda cool. 

J: It’s hard for me to keep up with all this. When I was teaching Digital Culture all I could do was present the dominant theories, which are quite old. You guys understand the examples. It’s funny because last semester’s group was kinda like, “Ehh” but the semester before really ran with the idea and it was the best section I’ve had in ten years. You just never know how the group is going to embrace the idea that “We’re the ones who understand virtual identity, he’s the one who has like 30 years of experience and sees the trajectory.” When the course had problems students were expecting me to go “blah blah blah” and know things like “Ready Player One.” Like, I wouldn’t know. I mean I’ve heard of it, I’ve heard my students talk about it, but I’m not a scholar of what’s happening, I’m a maker of things that will be a part of that digital world.

M: You know I had a train of thought that led me to my next question. What events or clubs can you recommend that provide access to creative tools to students who aren’t DMA majors?

J:  Well, the DMA Club or DMAAD is open to everyone, it’s right on GriffConnect. My colleague of 21 years Professor Dunkle did such an amazing job with that club, and it’s sad that he’s no longer a part of our program. I’m doing my best to cover for him, but we’ve got some students who are in there and we want some participation in it. That club has a long tradition of about 20 years where it has been open to everyone, and then it combined with what was called the advertising club. I guess the way that I would put it is that media doesn’t have content, so when I have like a Biology major who is interested in DMA, I’m always like, “Well great, take it as a dual major,” because there is all this incredible science that you can bring and express to people through digital media. That can also be applied to sports or really anything, I’ve had history majors who have worked on in-depth media projects with the history museum. It’s like this vessel that needs content, and I love to have my majors but the interdisciplinary possibilities are huge because it doesn’t have its own content. In a perfect world every major would have DMA as a dual major. They would be trying to take their knowledge and communicate it through social media, through video, through the web, through digital identity.

M: Kinda building off of that, one of my first thoughts was “Somebody has to make the graphics in those history textbooks.” You know, you look at the NFL and you see the scoreboard and all of the graphics, somebody has to make those. Having a general DMA major doesn’t always cut it. Sometimes you have to have someone with a larger knowledge base on the subject at hand in order to understand what goes into it, so that you can accurately present that to people. 

J: Yeah totally, and it’s usually specific knowledge of that culture from the inside. It’s not like DMA majors don’t have content interests, they do, they just might not have it in a major. So like you mentioned before, fandoms are often a specific field of interest for our students, some of our DMA students are massively into conventions and understand that content quite deeply, and they are able to do an interview with Michael Thomasson who is our game history professor. They’re knowledgeable and they can talk about that stuff and then they find themselves blogging about it and making videos about it and that’s no different to me than people like Bills fans. I know those seem like huge differences in the types of cultures that they are, but they’re both fandoms you know? We’ve had some great thesis projects done on fandoms like K-POP or students who are interested in a certain culture or subculture and being able to express it through media. One of our colleagues Bridget wrote for a film book blog and she’s a news producer. But she’s a film junkie and film history person, you know? She was a journalist of Hollywood film for a long time. I’m fascinated just with what we’re talking about in terms of bringing your content to the media. Use your interests and passions as content for the media that you’re making. Because ultimately, portfolios are not like competitively fighting with each other upon graduation. It’s more like “Mo knows his film. He knows his games. He makes videos,” and that’s what we do on this blog or as organizers of this game convention or whatever. People are trying to generate content in order to market towards their specific audience. 

M: This next question isn’t as light but the last one is. What in life inspired you to become an educator?

J: I had incredible teachers at a very young age. The drama teacher I had in seventh grade was with me all the way to high school and all the way through graduation. Shortly after that I graduated and went to BU and at that time I was interested in technical theatre because computers hadn’t been invented yet so lights, sound, costumes, masks, that kind of stuff. It was very exciting because very quickly while I was in college, Mac world started to appear and my friends were getting into computers and I was like “maybe I should get into this.” I was desperate to take a video class, and the communication school was a great place to do that there at BU. But that initial teacher shot me into that trajectory, so that kind of a teacher makes an imprint on you and when I was at BU they were like, “Hey, somebody’s gotta call you for a reference to Mr. Higgins,” and he was being nominated as one of the greatest Drama teachers in the United States. Then he won that honor because so many people spoke up for him. Instead of trying to train people as actors or teach them scenes, he worked completely with this idea that it was therapeutic for young people to participate in theatre. He was one of the early teachers who believed that the benefit was the confidence, the community and the communication. I got that from a really early age. I could tell all the stories of the professors I had that made me want to be a professor. They just made me want to do it, but that came much later for me. However, I didn’t jump into it immediately, I was ten years into the industry.

M: That actually perfectly segues into my next question. How long have you been working in the Digital Media field, and how long have you been working as a professor? 

J: That’s perfect, yeah. Computers and the web were invented around the time I graduated in 1992. That was when HTML was kind of invented, it was just so incredible. My piano teacher was at MIT and did computer science. The guys in my band who were working with computers were in something called the Tufts NEC program. Newland Conservatory and Tufts has a dual degree and one was computer science and one was cognitive psychology and music. We had this amazing house that we lived in with two drummers which was incredibly noisy. Up in the attic we had the media lab, which had computers and MIDIs and keyboards set up. I was a little bit older than everyone and we used to go into the universities and that’s why I have such a soft spot for people trying to get into the labs. These professors let us use the stuff and we made music videos. After just thinking of it completely creatively, we made electronic music and music videos and learned to edit on the computers. Then we all needed jobs. I ended up at a small digital media boutique in Boston. I worked that job for one year and got the experience, meanwhile my friends are going to places like Adobe because they’re really smart. Then I was like, “Well I can’t be a developer but I’m digging this advertising thing and I want to make a lot of money.” I was with this incredible firm in Boston and then I was like, “All the action is in New York City,” and started doing really big stuff. When I was working in New York I was a freelancer and I had a contract to work with an ad firm on 5th Avenue. I worked on about 5 projects for them and then bought a house in Buffalo because my wife is from Buffalo, and then did that work all the way until 9/11. That was the signal in life that I needed to do something different. It was tremendous to be working in New York City. I was in Buffalo on that day but it was just frightening and all of the work dried up for this firm because it was all in the financial industry. So I was like “Time to connect to my community in Buffalo.” I spent years developing a whole bunch of clients in Buffalo, and eventually I thought, “I really want to be a professor.” When I went to UB and told one of my mentors over there that I wanted to be a professor he said, “This isn’t the school of education, you need to figure out what your practice is.” I was shooting a lot of independent projects and they were shown in a lot of art organizations around town. Then out of that I went into Canisius. We were actually planning on moving so I could go and teach in Chicago and the opportunity came to stay here and make Buffalo our permanent home and I just embraced that. Then after three years of grad school and ten years of developing those projects I went to work with a dance choreographer in Toronto and Montreal. If you go to a concert and see all the visual effects, it was the very early days of that. And you might be asking, “what does this have to do with my job?” But that’s a part of creativity, it’s going to happen to every creative person. When you start a creative project it sets you on this vector and this pathway where things are going to emerge that you did not anticipate, that’s how you know that it’s a robust path for you creatively. When you’re sensing the emergence of that, you don’t know what that is. Creativity in of itself is emergent, it has its own creativity. It’s like a river and you’re starting to get into the current of it, and all of these other people are getting pulled into it. Kind of like how my students are my motivation for teaching, a creative project has that as you start to share it and get going in that. That can really pull you away from your job and have people asking,  “What are you doing spending all of your time on this?” 

M: You actually just gave me the title for this interview! That’s all I have for right now, thank you so much.