Directing Videos and Attending Berkeley Film School

Kreayshawn: “I’ve always been filming. I had a VHS camera when I was like 10 years old. There’s video of me as a 10-year-old freestyling in my old neighborhood. Then three years ago, I just started messing around with iMovie and putting music behind stuff. Blogs started picking it up so I was just like, ‘I’m going to start getting into music videos.’

“I had a whole bunch of videos and I was trying to go to film school and I was applying to pay. I tried to get a loan and I got denied. My grandpa couldn’t help me get a loan. My mom tried and got denied. I was stuck. [The Dean of The Berkeley Digital Film Institute Patrick Kriwanek] saw my videos and he could tell what I was filming with in the ghetto. I told him, ‘Honestly, I don’t have enough money.’ He really liked me and he was like, ‘Me and my wife give out a scholarship every year to underprivileged kids. I’m going to talk to her and see if she thinks we should give you one.’

“In my head I was like, ‘I’m already going to this school. I’ve got this.’ I was buying my school supplies before he even gave me an answer. Then he called me and that was really life changing. I didn’t think I could get something like that, but that just showed me anything is possible. And look, it is.

“I didn’t graduate high school and they definitely asked me for [my high school diploma]. I had a scholarship so there wasn’t really any signing of papers. It was like, ‘Yeah, you can come to this school for free.’ It was a program where you learn everything really hardcore and quick for a year and then you spend the next year working on projects. It just wasn’t really the path meant for me. Me being me, and always having to change up every five seconds, I just got impatient. I had to spread my wings up out of there. I moved to L.A. not long after that.”