Project12: The Thinker

Subject: Cris Huggins

Project12 Time: 4hrs

Project52 Time: 66hrs

For Project12 I wanted to play with the idea of ideas. How the bloom and expand and how the fad away from us all in the blink of the eye. I didn't want to get too literal with the idea of "The Thinker" but I enjoyed what Cris brought to this statue-like character. He has a great sense of what movement I like since I've been working with him for around 3 years now, so it was really easy to film him. We got all the footage we needed in 1.5hrs.

This one was similar to Project9, in that we had so much footage I had to really check each shot for only the essential and then bring that into the project. Looking retrospectively, I wish I had used a bit more light to reduce some of the noise in the picture, but oh well, no going back now! This little puppy took me about 3hrs to edit down to size. 

Cheers!

Project11: Femme Fatale

Subject: Ashley Merker

Project11 Time: 5hrs

Project52 Time: 62hrs

Project11 has a special little twist with it. I originally filmed this one back in February during a Super Bowl party at a friend's house. I found out Ashley was in town and wanted to shoot her before she left so we got together and made it work before she had to catch a bus back to PA. I just wanted to do something fun and sexy. That was really the only depth behind the video. I told her I wanted her to be a badass. And she was. I was super happy with the way this one turned out. I thought it wasn't finished when we were done shooting, which is why I never edited it, but boy was I wrong. We had enough footage for a feature length! haha We shot for around 3hrs before she had to head out.

Editing this one was really fun because we had so many hots of her getting ready. I had to choose the best angle of each action and also how I wanted to present them so that the viewer would understand what she was doing. I played a bit more with musicality in the editing of this one too which was pretty entertaining for me. It only took  me about 2hrs to finish Project11.

Enjoy!

Project10: Dryad

Subject: Hannah Seiden

Project10 Time: 3.5hrs

Project52 Time: 57hrs

So this one was shot really quickly. I was headed to a studio that I was teaching at in NJ and I brought Hannah along with me to assist. We had a rental car so we decided to take advantage of the freedom on the road and make a pit stop at Allaire State Park. We got into the woods, found a good spot, and decided to start filming right away. We only had 45 min to film so we moved on our first impulses. We stumbled upon those awesome train tracks in the woods and couldn't resist. So we decided to play a bit with those.

Going into this I didn't really know how I wanted it to play out so I'm happy it ended up how it did. Editing this was hard because I had so much footage since we shot anything and everything in our rush of a shoot and I had to spend a bunch of time just watching all the footage. Once I seeded out the bad eggs I found it easy to put together. All in all it took me about 2.5 hours to edit this one.

Let me know what you think!

Project9: Housewife

Subject: Gwen Benjamin

Project9 Time: 5.5hrs

Project52 Time: 53.5hrs

This is a fun one. I wanted to do something that wasn't so serious for a change. I had choreographed a piece to this song a while back and decided to expand on the idea in a film. It's very stepford wives-esque and I like the dark humor and sarcasm in the lyrics of the song.

I decided to film Gwen Benjamin this week and I was thrilled with the result! She was so easy to work with and comfortable on camera. And she has a sick kitchen so that helped quite a bit. Gwen's boyfriend Nathan is a New York Film Academy graduate and was also present for the shoot. He was wry much an unexpected surprise and was incredibly helpful with giving me some tips about not disorientating the viewer and angles of the body in the fame. It took me about 4 hrs to film and clean up the hue mess we made.

As I've said before, I feel that the plot driven projects are way easier for me to edit. It only took me about 1.5hrs to edit. The trickiest part was getting the las sequence where Gwen is both in the closet and resting in front of me. I used Motion to edit the rest of the shot where she is lying on the counter out and then overlayed that on the shot of me getting her out of the closet. A fun trick that I can't wait to use more of!

I was really happy with the end result! Let me know what you think!

Billy Bell | Artistic Director