Reflections Film
You know, this was a weird one. I might have a lot to say about it.
So, basically, this project was introduced as sort of a personal essay in video format to potentially use in our college applications if we wanted to pursue film in college.
The hardest hurdle to get over with this project was simply the narrow time frame. It was all conceived within the span of a couple weeks at the start of the school year, and was therefore hard to have done in the window of time we were given.
I made my script as a sort of stream of consciousness puked onto a page. It surrounded introversion, a twisted form of anxiety that came out as a weird irrational hatred and anger, and learning to deal with those feelings in me. It was mostly based around my experiences from March to May of 2019, in which I dropped into a pit of deep dark depression and spent a lot of time thinking about how much I hated the world for no particular reason when it got too loud and energetic for me to handle. After being screwed over at the end of April, I found myself actually wanting to be alone… and in doing so, making peace with the fact that I may have actually been an introvert.
I didn’t really like it my audio recording all that much. Still, I recorded it in my car, which was acting as a makeshift ISO booth. I quite literally did it after 2nd period before driving off to Starbucks for the middle of the day. If I remember correctly, I ended my recording by saying something along the lines of “I’m probably going to redo all of that. Now it’s time to go to Starbucks.”
Shockingly, though, the class actually liked it. It kind of took me by surprise because I thought it was a miserable and misguided script that had a lack of focus and a pretentious feeling to it. Mr. Taylor asked anyone who could relate to it to raise their hands— at which point most of them did. Which was strange to me. I guess it goes back to that whole perfectionism thing that seems to define my life so often. It was so much better when I didn’t dwell on it obsessively.
So I kept the script unaltered, aside from perhaps a slight rewording here and there. I then spent a few days in writer’s block hell, trying to figure out just what I would be making the story about. I didn’t want to deal with any actors, especially given the subtext of the narrative. I couldn’t decide whether to make it a narrative or more abstract. I wanted interesting camera angles, but I also wanted to tell a story. I couldn’t decide whether to use actual humans to represent humans or to use passing cars. I think it all reached a peak when my mind was coming up with some sort of ridiculous story that involved every car in the parking lot being my own, a million clones of myself walking around, and a twist revealing two clones to actually be the same version of me, just in different parts of a timeline, with one handing a pair of headphones to the other. It was stupid.
Eventually I went up to film over the course of three or four days. The street I chose in particular was Cristo Rey Drive in the Los Altos Hills, just about a mile off from my favorite Starbucks location that’s carried me through my midday free periods during junior and senior year. Though I haven’t done so in a while, I used to love going out to watch an infrequent Union Pacific freight that runs down seemingly abandoned rails through San Jose, Los Gatos, Cupertino, and up to a cement plant. The first spot I went to see that train is on the bridge that you can see in the distance of the thumbnail for the video. The first few times I went there to see it were the same times this film was written around. So it felt only appropriate to pay homage in a way by setting it in the proper location.
I actually really like some of the shots I ended up with. I’m not a huge fan of the close-ups I did of myself— mainly because I was too lazy to shave and the lighting makes my face look weird and red. But also just because I don’t think they’re framed amazingly. Some of my favorite shots are at the part where I start the car and have all the quick cuts. I remember trying to frame each close-up of the different parts of the car, like the pedals and the stick shift, and trying to get them look cool with the 250 mm lens— which I obsessively used to film most of this. And yeah, I ripped off Edgar Wright for that style. I also quite like the mirror shots I kept getting, the rack focus pull from under the car, and the shot of me cranking the parking brake on the hill. I remember framing a lot of the film’s structure around that shot of the truck going up the hill in the mirror and then in real life.
And that shot of the car speeding onto the street is pretty terrible. Yeah, it’s sped up, and it looks really dumb. I know, I know.
One of the weirdest things to me was during the rough cut, when a couple people laughed at the consecutive shots cutting backward of me in the parking lot staring through the left mirror. I don’t know why I remember that. I just found it strange that someone thought it was funny, because it wasn’t supposed to be. But looking at it again, I can see why that came across that way. Mostly it just looks kind of stupid now.
Okay, okay, enough rambling about it. Here’s the actual video.
I do feel the need to clear up a few things, though— yes, I wear mismatched Converse to school. Yes, the Smashing Pumpkins shirt was a blatant insert of my personality and how the band has helped me through a lot. And above all, no, that alien mask on the headrest of the shotgun seat has nothing to do with the message. I actually just have that on there full-time. You’ll know it’s my car if you see it sitting there. I got it at the Goodwill store in September of 2018 with a matching one for Richard Fukuda, and we used it in Alien Rock. It’s the same one in the Hoomanzuck video he made for Freestyle in May of 2019.
I edited it entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro. On the right is an image of the composition I created. The blue tracks are video tracks with accompanying audio at the bottom, and the green track is my audio recording, cut and modified a fair amount. It is the only audio track that’s not muted. It’s all quite a mess, isn’t it? A beautiful, wonderful mess of layers of footage that stagger in a terrible unorganized fashion. And I quite like it.
Anyway, in such a small time frame, I’m actually really proud of what I’ve managed to create here. Some of the shots are far better looking than I remember them being, and the audio isn’t too off pace with the video. And this film actually really managed to capture what I wanted it to. Not to mention that I was able to fool around with the 250 mm lens a bunch and actually get used to changing lenses for different camera angles I wanted to capture. As well as manually adjusting aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to get different imagery. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually tried too hard in the past to create an out-of-focus background. That’s something I’m surely going to continue to do from here on out.
And as a final note, I’m extremely proud for doing this entirely independently. I filmed every shot myself, both manning the camera and acting in it. Even the one of the car parking on the hill. I quite literally turned on the camera, set it up correctly, started rolling, drove down the street, turned around, and drove back. And I did it two or three times. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.