Last semester, I took a class at my community college called "The Moving Image," which was a film history class with a particular focus on experimental and avant-garde movements. It is, I think, my favorite class I've ever taken anywhere. I got exposed to so many fascinating movies and learned so much about the medium of cinema. The best part, though, was that for the two big homework projects, you had the option to make a movie emulating the style of a particular director we learned about in the class. I opted to take that option, and I had an absolute blast. Here are the results:

Movie 1: "The Twin Conjurers"

This one was done in the style of early silent film pioneer Georges Méliès, who made some of the first fantasy films using some of the first special effects. If you, like me, read the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret at a formative age, or saw Martin Scorsese's fabulous movie adaptation of it, then you know who I'm talking about. If not, here's an example of the sort of thing he did. I attempted to recreate some of the tricks that Méliès used in his movies to make a short narrative about two magicians, both played by me, trying to outdo one another. I couldn't be fully faithful to his methods because Méliès often did in-camera effects that aren't super possible with modern phone cameras like the one I used.¹ Still, I think I at least captured the spirit of the thing. My one regret with this film is that I didn't have time to pick a song that I thought synced up well with the goings-on onscreen, so I opted to make the thing fully silent. Problem is, what we think of as "silent films" were not silent because they generally had live musical accompaniment with them, so the austerity imposed by the lack of sound in this movie doesn't feel truly faithful to what a Méliès film would have been like in its day. Still, I'm quite pleased with how the thing turned out.²

Movie 2: "Reasons for Living: Fourteen Days in May"

This one was done in the style of Jonas Mekas. If you've never heard of him, he's often considered the de facto godfather of the American avant-garde film movement. He was a Lithuanian immigrant who was friends with literally everyone in the New York film scene, and he was a major force in getting his fellow filmmakers' movies distributed outside of the studio system.³ His own films were "diarist" films. He brought his camera with him everywhere, storing every little bit of celluloid he got in his house, and whenever the time came to edit together a movie he would go through the film strips in his house and edit them together into snapshots of his life. Here's a clip from Walden, one of the most well-known of his movies. I thought this was a really interesting way to make a film, so from May 1st to May 14th I used my phone camera to shoot random things from my day-to-day life, then figured out how to fit them together in the editing process. I borrowed a friend's typewriter⁴ to make the intertitles since Mekas seems to have used a typewriter for his as well. It was a unique challenge, but one that produced a result I am incredibly pleased with. I called it "Reasons for Living" because I frequently struggle with depression, but all of the things I captured on video make me feel joyous and content. There's big events, like my friend's birthday party and a midnight showing of Rocky Horror, but there's also small things, like my beautiful cat and the way the wind moves everything it touches. Life can be a crushing force, but it is the only thing that allows for these moments of beauty.

1. i.e. painting half the lens black to make a double exposure look smoother.

2. An abundance of gratitude must be given to my younger sibling, Lu, who helped shoot the film and assisted in switching out the items for the special effects.

3. It should be noted that while his legacy is generally regarded as pretty positive, it's complicated by the fact that his account of what he was doing during World War II before he moved to America is inconsistent with documentation from the time.

4. And she didn't want it back, so it's mine now! You cannot hear me, but imagine that I am cackling evilly.

This is my fav furniture set I've worked on! A SC of my in-engine work + images of the original 3d models I made

3D bun i made a while back
(srry for the 1 or 2 frames that flicker a bit 😭)