Jason
"If you're not pursuing your interests in life, you're not realizing who you are." -Nick Woodman
I heard this quote in a short documentary video about the CEO of GoPro and that's one of the reasons why I love GoPro...it's kind of like you see yourself in the company's core values. I started to love surfing during university and hoped to find a job that would correlate with my passions. My core passion in life is art- I'm not really good at painting or drawing, but I've always tried to get inspiration from it and it's something that has never left me.
After graduation, I wasn't very interested in my major (molecular science and engineering) but I did get a job at Academia Sinica, the leading research center in Taiwan. I thought...if I don't do anything I'm passionate about, I'm going to die. I thought I could earn enough money to pursue an art degree. I wanted to focus on something and hone in on my skills. I've always done drawings but I never saved them, which I kind of regret, so I started drawing to start a portfolio. An opportunity came up where someone saw my drawing and wanted me to help with some of the content of an art show. I thought this was going to my break into the art industry. I don't think they liked it cause I never heard back from them.
After that, I bought a GoPro. I started recording, and when you have all these short videos, you want to put it together; it's like a story. You capture bits and bits of your life and you want to share it, but for every art form you need to style it... so for videos, you can edit it and make it presentable. It started with wanting to share bits and parts of my life with my friends and family, but it became something that I want to share with the world that random people could connect to and understand. I started to want to make real good videos and wanted to understand more of the backstory of GoPro.
I found out that the CEO was a surfer, which I related to, and I saw other videos I really related to made by one of the GoPro media production artists. I learned about his story of how he majored in mechanical engineering but also had a passion in art and used his own time to learn more and get opportunities to make videos. He didn't go to film school but he had fun making videos, and I thought: if this guy could do it starting out with basically no film experience and become one of the lead media production artists, what's stopping me from pursuing my own passion? I watched basically all of his videos over and over and used all the other resources I could find so I could incorporate my own style into making my own videos.
I practiced and learned and then a video competition came up. I thought this would be the best way to break into the film industry, this time. I didn't think about winning; I just wanted to meet people and start networking and make a video that I was proud of. The theme of the competition was the beauty of Taiwan and I made mine about adventures through Taiwan. I ended up winning, surprisingly.
During the time I looked for all the resources, I knew there were basically none in Chinese. I knew that for those without a proficient level of English, it would be nearly impossible to self teach those film-making techniques. After I won that competition, I decided to make a channel for GoPro tutorials in Mandarin to share all the things I was able to learn and start a community in Taiwan while providing free access to a resource and spread everything about GoPro because I love it and believe in the brand, but also because I want to give back.