The Battle of the Brains

Welcome to Creatives Anonymous, a weekly newsletter that explores what it means to be a modern-day creative. It inspires, encourages, and empowers readers to make space for creativity.  

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I’ve always been fascinated by the dichotomy between the technical and creative brain.

This fascination has stemmed from knowing people throughout my life who have brilliant left-brained minds but also wild, creative right-brained ones. These people are gifted in math and science and pursue careers in software or medicine, but they are also amazing photographers and artists.

Since the dawn of creativity, we’ve pitted the right brain against the left brain. We’re told we must fall into one category, and that’s how we must identify, especially regarding creativity. We think we can’t possibly have right-brain tendencies because we naturally resonate with the left brain.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our right and left brains are more intertwined than we think. Instead of being a siloed relationship, they’re synergistic, like yin and yang. The left and brain are complementary forces that interact to create something new and dynamic greater than the sum of its parts.

That said, you can’t have one without the other—you need both to create. 

Even in the most “right-brained” types of creativity, you still need “left-brained” elements to master the craft, like knowing about anatomy and human form for drawing or the science behind mixing colors for painting. And if you’re using technology for your creative work, like photography, you need to know how to manipulate the camera to get the desired result.

I wanted to explore and understand how this dichotomy works—how the relationship between one’s technical and creative minds works and how they collaborate to innovate and create. 

So, I chatted with my friend Achilles, a Microsoft silicon engineer specializing in L1 design verification—the functional testing of a computer chip in a simulated environment. Outside of work, he enjoys photography, moviemaking, capturing aerial shots with his drone, and playing the saxophone (preferably a baritone).

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

For someone who works a super technical day job, you have a lot of creative hobbies. How do you keep up with your creative practice while building your tech skills?

Each day, I set aside time for creative practice in my routine. Whether it’s encoding raw video footage or learning a new lick (short song) on the tenor saxophone, I make sure to spare some time, if only a few minutes, after work for creativity. 

In addition, I intentionally separate professional and creative time. It isn’t difficult for a fleeting video sequence idea to collide with the monotonous code debugging session. I also don’t think my office neighbors would appreciate a mirrorless camera on them or a blow on the sax of “You Got a Friend in Me” at fortissimo through paper-thin walls during business hours.

How does the technical nature of your day job inspire or improve your creative practice and vice versa? Is there anything you take from one area and infuse into the other? How have you used technology in your creative work?

The mindset of a design verification engineer is, by nature, a creative one. We need to send signals into a piece of the chip’s design and test or verify that it spits the correct signals at the correct times. Our solution space–the set of valid cases we can test–is gigantic. Imagining those cases is an exercise in creativity, and culling the herd of cases to focus on those most likely to run in the final product is an exercise in critical thinking.

Lately, my job has encouraged me to spend more quiet time alone in my thoughts to foster creative ones. This can be difficult amid the many distractions of digital life, but it has become a lesson in a discipline that’s helped me think of hobby ideas, too. Every day presents a struggle to pause outside noise.

The vast majority of my creative work uses technology. For better or worse, my custom-built desktop, originally meant for gaming, has become my personal photo and video editing studio. On average, video editing tasks are more hardware resource-intensive than video games, so I needed something to support that. 

Computing aside, I use a modified Canon EOS M to capture raw HDR videos and photos. Since raw videos are about ten times larger than ordinary videos that one might capture on one's phone, I consumed about 5TB, or about 5,000GB, of hard drive storage last year, so I decided to build a second desktop PC to store and backup my photos and videos. To bring my photos to life, I use a professional photo printer. 

On another note, my phone has a high-fidelity recording microphone that I use to record myself when practicing playing the sax. Last but certainly not least is my DJI Mavic Air 2 drone. I use it to capture aerial photos and videos in my productions.

How would you describe the dichotomy between your technical mind and your creative one? How do they play off each other?

My technical mind acts as a means of expression for my creative mind. Saxophone aside, all my creative tools are a form of modern technology, but it also takes technical know-how to operate them. 

Let’s take my camera as an example. Its firmware mod, Magic Lantern, which I use to record raw video, doesn’t allow autofocus to operate when recording videos, so I’ve had to teach myself how to manually focus clips in a pinch. It becomes even more challenging when wider aperture lenses with a shallower depth of field come into the picture.  

At times, I see my creative mind as an outlet from my technical mind and day job, just as I did when I was a student. Therefore, unlike many STEM-focused high students, I made music the center of my extracurricular activities instead of robotics. I practiced and performed in every ensemble available at school at least once on the baritone saxophone, my main instrument, or the tenor saxophone. I occasionally play a few licks on my saxophone during breaks while working from home.

Have there been any opportunities where you’ve brought together your technical knowledge with your creative skills? If so, I’d love an example.

Yes. About three years ago, I put my Part 107 Certificate–a commercial drone piloting license–to use. I launched Achilles Aerial, a professional aerial photography and videography business. This marked the commercialization of a technical and creative hobby that started when I was first lent a drone in a class and used it for a purpose unrelated to my classwork: producing music videos with drone footage to entertain my family and friends. 

Today, I use my drone and camera to capture professional-grade footage of events, properties, and more. Creative expression takes the reins when video editing is done in my studio. An example of one of my projects is a promotional video I put together about the annual Greek festival hosted by St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Seattle.

What’s one creative project that you’re working on now?

Last year, I traveled to Singapore with Duke University’s team to compete in the semifinals of the Rainforest XPrize. The competition aimed to build and test remote sensing tools, such as drones and remote-control vehicles, to study biodiversity in the rainforest. 

Our goal was to identify as many plant and animal species in the rainforest as possible in a fixed amount of time, and we used drone photos, videos, and bug traps deployed by drones to do just that. I was the principal drone pilot and successfully flew our homemade, untested aircraft carrier drone powered by a hybrid-electric engine for the first time. 

During our downtime, I explored the city and shot many videos focusing on the day-to-day life of locals and our team’s interactions with them. Looking back, I realize that it kept the memories of the once-in-a-lifetime trip alive, so I’m putting together a film about the trip with music played at an authentic hot pot restaurant we patronized.

Learn more about Achilles by visiting his website or YouTube channel.

Interested in sharing your creative story? Submit your information to be featured in a future issue of Creatives Anonymous. 

CREATIVE CORNER

• 🎞️ What I’m Consuming: I binged Under the Bridge and saw Challengers over the weekend. 10/10 recommend both.  

• 💡 What I’m Loving: I’m thinking about trademarking a phrase for my business, which wasn’t something I had on my bingo card for 2024 (or ever?). 

• 🎨 What I’m Working On: I want to play with a new novel idea. I feel so strongly about this that I’m tempted to put my current WIP on ice….

• 💭 Weekly musing:

Thank you 💕

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