You probably remember Shia LaBeouf from his Disney show Even Stevens, and then as the charming star of the first three Transformers movies. But since then, he’s turned to more of a performance art thing. Last year he wore a paper bag over his head that said “I’m not famous anymore” on the Berlin Film Festival red carpet. Then he did a piece called “I Am Sorry” where he sat silently in a room, and invited people to sit with him and do whatever they chose. He was also part of an interpretive dance number in the music video for Sia’s song “Elastic Heart”.
Needless to say, Shia doesn’t hold back when it comes to his art. He’s a no excuses kind of guy. His latest art project, which has gone viral, actually turned out to be an excerpt of a much longer video. The “just do it” motivational speech is part of a series called #Introductions filmed by a class at Central Saint Martins, an art school in London, England.
According to The Guardian, the assignment was to “submit a piece of text lasting up to 30 seconds or no more than 100 words. This can be as poetic, abstract or literal as you like — with the emphasis on expressing the feeling and tone of the work being introduced.” Shia performed 36 different scenes in one day, all in front of a green screen, and his motivational speech is just the one segment that happened to go viral.
As strange as it seems at first— he’s screaming at the camera and actually seems completely fed up with people who don’t “just do it”, the message actually does make sense. He finishes up with “if you’re tired of starting over, stop giving up.” While it’s hard to take someone with a rattail-inspired braid, and clear rage issues seriously, he’s kind of right. You should listen to Shia.
The green screen choice was no accident either. All his performances were filmed in front of a green screen and released under a Creative Commons license with the intention that people take them and turn them into whatever they wanted. And that’s exactly what people did. Shia was given his own TED talk, and put into scenes from movies like Toy Story, The Avengers, and Star Wars. Even James Franco got in on the parody videos with his own version— “Just Poo It”, a motivational video for kids who are potty training.
Next time you’re feeling unmotivated, just think about Shia absolutely losing his mind over people who refuse to make their own dreams come true. You don’t want to be one of those people who lets their dreams continue to be dreams, now do you?
