Recent Work
In 2023, I joined a video production group called Short Cuts whose goal is to create a forum where people can come together and make and screen short videos. The videos are usually 2.5 to 5 minutes and relate to a specific set of challenges (often focusing on genre, lines of dialogue, or camera shots). The group meets and screens their videos every 2-3 weeks at The Vino Theater in Brooklyn. As of this writing, the group has had ten events and the work below represents projects that I’ve written or directed and screened for the group. While I have been making short films for nearly ten years, I’ve found that the Short Cuts community has allowed me to develop my video production on all levels. As the community has evolved, I have found that members have increasingly specialized their skills and though I enjoy editing and writing, I have found that I am most happy directing actors. I also believe that having the opportunity to screen projects on a regular basis is essential to developing as an artist.
Early Experimental Work
While the majority of my recent work is narrative in nature, most of the work that I’ve done in the past is experimental. By “experimental” I mean projects in which narrative is not the main goal, rather, the projects are intended to explore: software, the interaction of sound and moving image, motion graphic techniques, or art history and digital media itself. For instance in 1-800-USA-9898, I paired the text from a video art project by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman (“Television Delivers People”) along with news footage of an uncanny incident in which a cement truck crashed into my childhood home. It seemed like an exciting experiment to see how the text would function when paired with news segments which presented my reality (my neighborhood and childhood home). I found two news segments that covered the event and was surprised by the difference in tone. One segment seemed chilling and terrifying; a story of certain death avoided. The next segment seemed more light-hearted and presented the event as a minor inconvenience i.e. just one of those things. The Serra/Schoolman's statement, "Commercial television defines the world in specific terms" highlights the media's ability to frame or conjure realities or events. I made the choice to push the subtle tone of each news segment by adding music (scary music for the first segment and quirky, comedic music for the second segment). A repeated argument in Serra/Schoolman's video is that television is a delivery mechanism for advertisements (commercial propaganda). This assertion motivated my decision to include television commercials after each news segment. I chose advertisements of the past because I felt the propagandistic qualities of commercials are magnified in older forms of the medium. Lastly, instead of scrolling the text upward, as Serra/Schoolman did, I scrolled my text from left to right to satirize this common trope seen in news segments in which crucial news information flows beneath the images.
Experimental/Sound
Acceptance was inspired by the release of Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech that she would have delivered America had she won the 2016 election. I discovered this speech at the end of 2021 and had the idea to pair an AI reading of her speech to photographic images that were taken during the January 6 Capitol Hill Attack. I thought the pairing of these two elements (the hopeful messages of Clinton’s speech) mixed with the terrifying images of the J6 attack created a unique frisson and might motivate viewers to consider “what could have been” i.e. how the four years during which Trump presided would’ve been different had Hillary been elected. The images were all converted to black and white in order to create a seamlessness of experience. The musical accompaniment was taken from the Godspeed! You Black Emperor album “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven”.
The Mad Max ADR was created in a post-production sound class that I taught at CUNY - York in 2021. My class took this well known section of the film Mad Max Fury Road and rerecorded every character and edited it together along with ambient sound. This project was meant to teach students about the common practice of ADR, both from a technical as well as conceptual perspective.
Early Narrative Work
Jim & Red’s Day at the Dog Park and The Great Bundini were the first short films I ever made and were created as a result of a video production class I took at the College of Southern Nevada in the Spring of 2014. Though I had a Masters degree in Fine art, I knew very little about video production or editing or cameras or working with actors, but the class demystified many aspects of the process and inspired me to make more videos and learn more about digital software. A few years later, I created a character named Dr. Gnat and made several absurdist shorts that integrated my growing knowledge of After Effects, specifically with visual effects.
