Today we’d like to introduce you to Cubas.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Cubas. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Curiosity; that would be the appropriate word to describe how life has unraveled a path leading me to cinematography. I can remember so vividly my earliest memory being the youngest of 4, with huge age gaps in between all of us, and the rush I got when discovering that behind the winter coats in the closet were stacks of VHS tapes with endless hours of recorded memories – many of which were from before I even existed. I couldn’t understand it then as a child, but I was obsessed with this notion of documenting these memories – immortalizing these stories (our stories) forever. It was, and still is, a powerful thing to look at those “home movies” – of which I’ve since painstakingly transferred over minute by minute (in real time!) for mother’s day a few years ago – and see a moving visual representation of ourselves from the past. A literal, visual time machine. This was the first spark in my mind. The initial glimpse at the sheer power of this ever evolving medium we know as film making.
I would not consciously know it for another decade but over the course of my adolescence, I would slowly build a love for visual language and acquisition in many different forms.
Late in high school, I can remember earning the opportunity to direct a comical one-person play about a homeless man who tries relentlessly, but fails time and time again, to get arrested before the winter comes to avoid the blistering temperatures. There was a moment in the play when the stage lights would change from “day” to “night”. This was always my favorite part of the play because it indicated a shift in emotional tone for the story and the lighting change helped tremendously to engage the audience with that idea before any part of the monologue was spoken. The colors, the darkness, how cold it felt all of a sudden all played their parts. These are all ingredients that I can see now, in hindsight, but at the time at 17, all I could try to understand was the feeling I got in my chest when the audience would uniformly quiet down during this simple change in lighting.
Again, I wouldn’t understand what was happening quite yet, but this was the second spark in my mind of what I would later learn in life about one of the many techniques that a cinematographer can utilize to communicate visually.
It was sparks like these and pure curiosity that gravitated me towards taking a huge gamble to study Cinematography at Columbia College Chicago and it’s this same curiosity for the highly technical and immeasurably creative art form that has led me to a successful career within this industry as a working freelance Cinematographer and owner of my own company, OPiiA.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Most, if not all, flights I’ve ever taken in my life have experienced some turbulence on the way to the destination. This is no different and I’m far from landing the plane, so to speak. Including my studies, I’ve been immersed in film and cinematography for well over a decade now. While there have been many external obstacles along the way – many of which were far from my control – what I meditate on and discuss the most with my colleagues and closest companions is the internal struggles we face on this journey of being self-sufficient artists and business people.
I can only speak for myself here but I know in the time I have been working towards shifting my biggest dreams into reality, I have been my harshest critic and in many ways, my worst monster. Nothing is ever enough and it’s so easy to default to putting a spotlight on all of my errors and missteps, even during the midst of a success. One of my greatest misconceptions was assuming that this way of thinking was motivational and uplifting when my reality was that it was self-deprecating and self-destructive. And unlike the external obstacles I mentioned earlier, how I talk to myself is fully within my power to control. What I found is like any other exercise and muscle you want to build: practice breeds progress. So practice I did and still am to this day of how to speak to myself compassionately instead of critically, especially with regards to the content I create and the films I collaborate on to bring to the screen. And the results of that self-compassionate mind, after much time and practice, have been magnificent. Being interviewed here is the clearest example of that.
Please tell us about the company.
In its simplest terms, OPiiA (pronounced Ōpee-ah) is a company that I use as a filter for my creative visual works, specializing in narrative short and long form fiction and documentary storytelling. It serves as a network hub connecting local creatives on collaborative projects.
Before it’s inception as a company, OPiiA was and still is a living breathing Instagram portraiture gallery aptly named The OPiiA Collective. I curate this gallery by collecting photos of friends and strangers alike and asking participants to close their eyes and take a deep breath so I can capture two shots of them – one with their eyes closed and another with eyes open looking directly into the lens.
Derived from the Ancient Greek word -opia, meaning “from the eyes”, my company takes root from this origin and more specifically from the definition given by the brilliant author John Koenig which claims that opia is meant to describe “the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable” to the individuals participating.
Both my company OPiiA and The OPiiA Collective (instagram.com/opiia_collective) were birthed from this desire to share that intense ambiguity through creative works of visual mediums across all platforms.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.JoshuaCubas.com
- Phone: 6788623335
- Email: connect@joshuacubas.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cubas_joshua/
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