Instructor Spotlight: Cliff Notez

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

I’ve been a film and gaming enthusiast since I was a child. I eventually would get my Master's in Digital Media at Northeastern and a large part of my degree was studies in gaming and film. In that time I would start my own digital media production company in Cambridge and began working on hundreds of both passion and client projects. To this day I’m lucky to be able to do what I love for my career. I’ve taught film master classes and I ran the digital media education programs at the ICA on the side for a few years before I became a professor at Berklee. That allowed me to tap into my other love of music. Since then I’ve taught at MIT, Emerson, and Northeastern.

As of the last few years, I’ve been digging deeper into some personal projects in both film and gaming, connecting both of those worlds, exploring why us humans love it the way we do. Since I was doing this in the pandemic, I couldn’t help but think about the existential escapist undertones that came with all of these mediums. I wanted to explore that deeper, and what better way to do that than in the classroom.

How has your work in the music space informed your ideas of filmmaking and gaming? 

As you can probably tell by now, there aren’t many areas of artistic expression I haven’t studied and fallen in love with extensively. When you’ve spent so much time in all of these different worlds, speaking these different languages of the art form, you can’t help but start to mesh them all together. Like spanglish, but for art. For me, at this point, I can’t help but see them all as the same. The way they operate in my artistic practice is almost co-dependent. Every song I write, I’m simultaneously seeing the visuals for it, creating the game that it could be, and it works the same with the films I make, or the games I design, etc. It makes writer's block come around less, and can definitely be overwhelming at times, which is why, with my art, with my music, I’m now taking a few steps back and approaching it from a world building perspective.

Your course discusses gaming and filmmaking as a way to adapt to our increasingly digital world. How have recent products shifted or shaped how we think about our realities (i.e. VR Headsets, AI, etc.)?  

I think it’s kind of funny honestly, a lot of people are worried, some people are freakin’ out. I think it’s funny because we’ve been here before: Auto-tune, Napster, y2k, the invention of the computer, the invention of electricity. We’ve always been terrified of things that end up revolutionizing the world. I’m running into the proverbial fire then. This is what attracts me to it, especially coming from people who are historically marginalized. How can I be ahead of the curve, and share that information for people who may not have access to it? I think if we can get some of our brightest minds, with the best intentions for the historically marginalized, there might be a brighter future for us.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course? 

Well first of all, basic skills on how to develop a game and a film. But more importantly, the skills, language, and tools to think critically about those games and films that they design, make, and more importantly, consume. Games are one of the largest consumed items in the world, and only increasingly so. The power that they contain is untapped with world changing potential. It’s already being changed by it -- maybe this class will help change it for the better.

Cliff Notez is an award-winning multi-digital media artist, musician, entrepreneur, and filmmaker. Their art is a continuous exploration of the Black mind. They were named “Best Musician” and one of the “100 Most Influential Bostonians” by Boston Magazine, and listed among the “50 Most Influential Bostonians” by Boston Common Magazine. They have over 11 Boston Music Award nominations and were the winner of “Song of the Year” in 2020 and the coveted “Best New Artist” award in 2018. They are currently an Assistant Professor at the Berklee College of Music. They hold an MPS in Digital Media from Northeastern University.