By Jacob Bates

I started out this project by thinking about what I could do with my Video8 camera in conjunction with my DSLR, and how that could work thematically. The thing that immediately came to mind was making the VHS style footage a dream. From there, I took inspiration from my girlfriend telling me about how she started seeing things because she was losing so much sleep, staying up late to study for midterms. It sounded really frightening to me and I wanted to try and make a video that exemplified that. I believe in the end I really accomplished that.

Planning went smoothly and it was the first time where I actually made a whole storyboard from start to finish and it was extremely helpful. Every video I made before this was me just winging it shot by shot and it made filming such an insanely easier process. My girlfriend was the actress in this and I think she did great, but it was pretty difficult to convey what I wanted to her. I did make the storyboard, but seeing as there wasn’t much dialogue I didn’t think to write any kind of script. Setting up shots was easy but getting what I wanted out of my actress took quite awhile.

After filming wrapped, I realized editing was the true challenge. A lot of what I wanted to do required skills I didn’t have in Premiere Pro yet and I had to learn a bit. I also did a lot of outside the box editing to try new things, making everything more dynamic and streamlined. I believe I accomplished this very successfully, after many, many, many iterations and a lot of people giving me constructive criticism.

This was a great experience overall. I didn’t have a lot of issues and having a relatively short film made it a lot easier for me to get it done and just try new things, get creative with it. I look forward to doing more projects with mixed media after I have done this.