Movies always inspire me more than anything else does. When I watch one I love, it lingers — it shapes how I see things, and it makes me want to go build something of my own. I've made three short films so far, each one a step further from the last. Here are the first two.
My brother and I made this LEGO stop-motion film during the pandemic — a battle between stormtroopers and rebel soldiers on the snowy planet of Hoth, shot one frame at a time. Nothing about it was pre-planned. When we realized the stormtroopers needed a general to lead them, we dug one up, "jazzed it up," and animated his arrival frame by frame. When my brother asked how anyone would know who he was, we didn't add a line of dialogue — we animated the general's hand moving up and down in a commanding gesture, and the troops building a wall around him in response. We didn't plan that as symbolism, but looking back, it was: an authority figure who valued himself over his troops, straight out of the Star Wars movies we'd watched more times than I can count. My family has probably rewatched this movie more than my brother and I spent making it.
For an assignment from Señora Perales to adapt Borges' "El Otro" — a story about a conversation with one's future self — I immediately pictured a mysterious figure in angled sunglasses and a flowing overcoat. The Matrix, unmistakably. I opened on a close-up of my kitchen's digital clock, waited for it to strike 10:59, then filmed myself pouring cereal into a bowl for a midnight meal — the cereal slowing and freezing just above the bowl, like time bending around Neo. By the time I shot the introduction and conclusion together, with the clock ticking to 11:01, I realized I'd folded in Inception's non-linear structure too, without ever planning to. I had a vision for the visual style before I even knew how the story would unfold.
My partner and I shot the opening of this one as a single two-minute take through my school's library, tracking him as he walked its halls. Only after we finished did I realize the shot echoed the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas — I hadn't seen the movie, but the same instinct for isolating a character through one unbroken take had clearly reached me some other way, through The Godfather or Suits. The second act unfolds like a heist, with a voiceover laying out the scheme as the action plays alongside it — an idea rooted in Ocean's Eleven, though it came to us through our own judgment before either of us named the reference out loud.
A handful of friends who shared my love of making and watching movies and I decided Milton needed a space for exactly that. We started by narrowing down what the club would actually cover, then polled 50 Milton students to gauge real interest, drafted a full club constitution, and planned and filmed an example meeting to show what the club would look like in practice.
Our proposal — interest numbers, constitution, and meeting video included — went to the teacher responsible for approving new clubs. The answer: we'd have to wait for the next official club-creation cycle. Rather than sit on the idea, my two co-founders and I met with the head of the existing Photography Club, which had a low following at the time. She agreed that film-related events could help grow interest, and our clubs merged — the three of us becoming co-heads of the newly combined Photography & Film Club. Our weekly commitment during the three-month planning phase was a steady one hour.