"Lean Into the Earth, Find a Certain Place to Love"
Just prior to filming this video, I was focused on highlighting the beauty around my local area. Aiming to push how crucial it is to explore, enjoy, and appreciate where one is from before desiring to be somewhere else. While doing this, I soon realized how mistreated our land was. How trash-filled and litter-ridden our forests and waterways are. Therefore, along with several bodies of photographic work, I created this video and created a Facebook group where we met and picked up trash in our local state park.
"It Goes Fast…"
This montage is about the concept of time and how quickly it seems to pass us by. In the moment it can sometimes feel like it’s dragging on, or like you never want it to end. Regardless, in hindsight, the days fly by. This is a popular concept, especially in college. Surrounded with clichés like “live in the moment,” “these are the best days of your life,” “it’ll be over before you know it,” etc. However, despite all of these warnings, people often still lose sight of this. Looking back, so many of my good memories I wish I would’ve been a little more present and savored a little more, taking that extra step to enjoy the experience or opportunity, even if I didn’t feel like it in the moment. Therefore, the purpose of this video was to use this concept to remind people to savor the days, whether you’re traveling, in class, working, wherever, make sure you have as few regrets as possible.
"Quarantined"
This was created in the end of March 2020, when things were on full lockdown in central Ohio. I was finishing up my final semester of college and was still in a video production course, so I created this video in response to being locked inside everyday all day. Trying to make it rather lighthearted and enjoyable, as things were already depressing enough, nobody needed to see a “woe is me” type of video. The audio is all filmed live and in the moment from the shown device, it was chosen at random and my activities responded to it just as if they would have had I not been recording myself.
"Coping with COVID"
Lockdown lifted, finishing up my final semester of college, it seems like the world and everyone in it is in shambles. This film was a direct response to everything that has happened since the beginning of the pandemic. The canceling of classes, graduation, travel, and pretty much life as we knew it. I wanted to treat it as a video journal, conveying not just my thoughts about everything, but where I was and what I do to process my thoughts as well. The audio was recorded separately, just randomly as I lived life and had thoughts. I spoke into a voice recorder then put that overtop of the visuals during editing, some video clips were a response to thoughts I had, while some thoughts were responses to things I recorded. However, nothing was “planned,” wanting to make it as wholesome and reflective as possible.