Sapphire Shores - Gone

I made this over the course of two weeks. The NIC Film Club would show student short films before screenings. There wasn't one lined up for the next one, and I said I'd do it. Structurally it's entirely original material: either video I had on my phone, field phone footage, DSLR photos, staged camcorder footage, and intentional stop-motion phone photos.

This was entirely edited in Sony Vegas, and I learned a ton about editing from doing this. My laptop could barely handle what I was trying to do, but I was able to express a vision in a way I hadn't done before. A lot of the editing decisions followed from iterative visual and musical cues. Stop-motion progresses in time with certain beats. I make a mask that follows the rock face on the beach. The interplay of different aspect ratios also shows a nascent attentiveness to the material I'm working with.

Conceptually, I was riffing on the title of the track, “Gone", so I tried to represent emotional absence. This manifested as a representation of a gay couple, one of them too focused on abstraction to be actually present in the relationship. This character is undermining his own capacity to be in the world. This was also made during the time I was living in this house in Coeur d'Alene, (the same one from Denial) and it affectively captures a lot of what I was thinking and feeling during that period of my life.

Here's the link if the embedded one above doesn't work. Hosted on my YouTube channel.