Refugee Essentials
"The end of the line."

The Origin - I was really interested in some basic ideas of materialism and attachment, recurring themes in The Medium is the Massage. Just before making "Refugee Essentials," I was in a group of people who were temporarily displaced by a pipe burst in my house. The event had a relatively minor effect on my own possessions and all of our lives. We were each allowed to return to the house to grab "essential items" from our rooms before the house was restored. I was really intrigued and amused by some of the items which individuals considered essential.

The Method - The audio originates from two sources. 1) I conducted short on-camera interviews about the central event in this film. 2) I collected audio samples of dripping and cascading water flows and breaking wooden boxes. The audio established stark contrast between the first and second half of the video. The visuals includes shots of lights seen through thick household objects used as color filters and close-ups of material objects. This visuals support the same contrast between the beginning and end of the video. The filtered images of lights hint to themes of death and severity, while the material objects establish an unexpectedly ironic tone as a conclusion.

The Inspiration - McLuhan writes, "The circuited city of the future will not be a huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis." My experimental video is called Refugee Essentials. My project tries to display some of the material obsession that comes out of this age of mass production.

I really admire Jason Yi's ability to find beauty in items, objects and images that are often dismissed as ordinary or mundane. Although I couldn't attend his lecture, I read several articles about his work and saw his installation. In an interview with a Lawrentian reporter, Yi stated, "It is important to not overlook the mundane and transform something seemingly inconsequential to have consequence." For his Lawrence installation, Yi has done just that. In using zip ties to represent the sky, the viewers are forced to acknowledge an important fact: the things we interact with and witness on a daily basis hold a lot of beauty, inherently.

In "The Medium is the Massage," McLuhan forces the reader to do the same thing that Yi does. A great example of this arrives on pages 49 and 50, where the words "Printing, a ditto device" are pasted all over both pages. We are again forced to look at every detail of a series of words that we might otherwise dismiss.

Also, I recently became interested in still photography and made an attempt at the first "series." These are the schools I attended in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The World I Live In.

I love movies. They are the central driving force in my life. As a viewer, I gain inspiration and insight from great films I watch. As a film major, I am receiving the knowledge and skills to succeed as a documentary filmmaker. I am really only interested in directing documentaries professional, not narrative film. The reason for this was articulated perfectly in a Mark Twain quote that I read several years ago: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't."

I made two films during my first two years at Lawrence. Freshman year, I co-directed a short documentary about the experiences of three undocumented Latino youth in the Fox Cities that are pursuing higher-education and stable employment. I worked with Kate Siakpere and Nancy Corona on the film, titled "¡Adelante!"

This movie resulted my first television appearance on Green Bay's Fox News channel for my involvement in the Civic Life Project. I instantly became a star.

Last year, I completed "Forgotten History," a longer documentary about the experiences of African American students at Lawrence throughout the school's history. It was screened at Lawrence's first Black Affinity Reunion in September of 2014. Last week, I decided to recut the film to be ten minutes shorter. And I can't decide if it's too late to do so.

After making "Somewhere Between," I made a mediocre film adaptation of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." The process involved the casting of local actors in Colorado Springs, the assembly of a film crew (film students at Colorado College) and filming in one four-hour period. This is the only narrative film I have directed.

The first short film I made was a ten-minute documentary about the attempted suicide of my best friend, Will. The film is titled "Somewhere Between" and features interviews with Will, his girlfriend at the time and his mother. Four years after making the film, I've decided to upload it and share the movie with this class, but cannot find it on my computer or hard drive.

I recently watched "The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins." In one scene, two musicians play a guitar and harmonica duet. The harmonica player, performing on his knees, breaks into tears at one point and screams between notes as he does so. I found this to be the most powerful scene in the film.