Excerpts from a short film I made a few years ago during a 3-day vow of silence.

Let’s talk about this for a second: I was having a weird time. I had left California on a train a little over a year before and come to Rhode Island, a place I’d never been before. I decided to do this project when my best friend, who had been staying in Rhode Island after coming back from Europe, decided to move back to Oakland. The week leading up to the project’s start, my ex, who I hadn’t heard (almost) a single word from since I left, sent me an email. I was also approaching a few personal anniversaries.

The vow of silence became a sort of meditation on who I was and who I’ve known in my life.

These are some of my favorite bits. The complete film… I kind of can’t stand to watch it anymore. One of the tricky things about making work that is sincere is that sometimes you grow out the phase you’re in when you make it, and then watching yourself cry about ex-girlfriends on camera makes you want to punch your younger self in the head.

I am very proud of this project. I did something honest about what I was feeling at the time. I don’t feel that way anymore. And the next extremely honest project I make won’t talk so insipidly about, like, LOVE, man.

From The Archives:

First semester at California College of the Arts, I was given this assignment in my Time & Media class: make a one-minute film using a word from a Shakespearean sonnet as a springboard. Do the entire video in-camera with no edits.

This is what resulted.

Most folks did something pretty simple – one guy just pointed the camera up at the ceiling while he drove through a tunnel – but I spent a solid hour doing take after take to get this just right (and down to 1 minute).

Please forgive the image quality; getting this onto the internet involved dubbing a Digital8 tape to DVD, ripping the DVD footage at a poor compression, then capturing the DVD rip with a screen capture program when it wouldn’t import into Final Cut, and finally compressing the hell out of it to fit it on a disk for my college portfolio application. I could get a higher-resolution version, but it hardly seems worth the effort.

Also, my favorite outtake:

From The Archives:

This was an Intro To Video project (I think). No particular assignment other than “make a project for the End Of Semester Show.” The core idea was to make an elaborate tracking shot with stop-motion, which is a neat idea but I did, like, zero planning. This came out pretty sloppy.

Having myself dance around the frame like I do came from a weird fixation I had with the animator being part of the animation, and the means of the animation being transparent. (The film Pan With Us by David Russo does this a lot better.) I still like some of the ideas in A Couple Of Minutes, but I’d want to execute it considerably better if I did it again.

The only surviving copy of this project was on a VHS tape, which I piped into my camcorder with RCA cables and then imported into Final Cut. There was a gap in the timecode just before the project played, which turned on the display (which would not turn off). Blame the overall image quality on storing a VHS tape in boxes for 7 years.

Audio by Stevie Hryciw (sampling heavily from the Contra Hard Corps BGM.)