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A couple of weeks ago I held a screening of the final version of VIDA, my senior thesis which I had been working on for what feels like forever. This screening was mostly made for the film’s patrons, people who supported this endeavor during our crowdfunding campaign last November. It was really electric and satisfying to watch an audience full of people I know and care for experiencing this film. The screening was followed by a brief conversation with my high school librarian (who was my film guy during my MSHS days) and a Q&A with the audience.
Over the past month or so, and leading up to this screening we had, I had been working on blu-ray editions for the film. I am a huge fan of physical media, and hope this will be the first of many Blu-Ray’s I’ll author under the Kinorama umbrella. Producing VIDA’s Blu-Ray was a journey; I hadn’t produced a disc since burning home videos during the iDVD days. I learned a lot, and am happy with how it turned out. The product is packed with over 2 hours of special features and behind the scenes stuff, and a 40 page booklet containing the whole script and essays from some of the crew. I couldn’t be happier to preserve VIDA in this little plastic box. I sold a bunch of these Blu-Rays at the screenings, and continue to do so online, all profits fund our film festival submission fees. I’m attaching the little essay I wrote as the introduction to the booklet below, and have linked the Blu-Ray’s here.
‘Welcome To VIDA’ taken from the VIDA Blu-Ray booklet:
If you are reading this booklet that must mean you are someone special, someone who believed in us. A supporter of the arts who cares about cinema and appreciates the passion and hard work that goes into each and every film. VIDA was a labor of love brought to life by an immensely talented and unwavering crew. This Blu-Ray edition of VIDA chronicles many chapters in our journey to get to where we are now, and serves as the ultimate time capsule for our film. It is so packed with special features (quite literally filling the disc to capacity) to the point where I would actually be quite astonished if you read and watch every single thing in this beautiful plastic box.
It all began in November of 2022. It was my junior year at Dodge and I was thinking about what I wanted to produce for my AP that coming semester (an AP, or Advanced Production, is essentially a thesis lite made during junior year). Grant and I got lunch, and I asked him to pitch ideas. He talked about growing up, the loss of innocence, and the complexities of maturing. Stuff that’s honestly pretty common in student films. In turn I told him I wanted two things: a retro-futuristic stage build setting, and a robot protagonist. Our minds raced as we thought of exploring these themes through the lens of a child-like robot, and out of that conversation Grant wrote a 6-page treatment, and I began looking for a director.
Of course nobody wanted to touch the project. A Dodge AP is limited to 8 minutes/script pages, is completed in its entirety in a single semester, and has a $2,500 budget cap. With this entire world we were envisioning it becomes an understatement when I say that VIDA was too ambitious for an AP. Some could, and did, argue that it was even too ambitious for a thesis. VIDA was in the back of my mind for a while, and for a long time I didn’t think I would be able to do it as my thesis as the search for a director willing to join the film became harder than I had anticipated. Thankfully though, I met Louis near the end of the semester. He seemed just as passionate about the robot as Grant and I, and I pretty much instantly knew he would be the one to join us.
And I am incredibly grateful and glad it didn’t work out as intended. Because knowing my stubborn self, I would have dived right in and fully believed I could pull it off, in turn producing a disaster of a film which wouldn’t have even begun to come close to the version of VIDA we share with you today. So I instead teamed up with Sean, a dear friend and one of the directors I originally pitched AP VIDA to (Sean also ended up being VIDA’s 1st AD). I joined his crazy project as their producer and we made ‘Be Water, My Friend’, a film I am incredibly proud of. Be Water’s reception and quality made me believe I was now ready to take on the scale of VIDA, as if producing one great simple short prepared me for what would become my most challenging endeavor thus far.
Which brings me to my broader point. Our school’s dean used to famously introduce the undergrad thesis by saying something along the lines of “remember these are learning exercises”. This would bother some of us students, as we felt like saying this diminished the quality of the films being presented. Only now, being at the end of this nearly two-year-long journey, do I understand what Galloway meant. Because, as happy as I am with the final film, in all honestly VIDA’s greatest feat will always be the lessons it incurred in us. It may sound dramatic, but I am not the same person I was when this all began, and I am certainly not the same producer either. As I’ve also seen my fellow crew members evolve throughout the production, the lessons and experiences imparted on us by VIDA have resulted to be truly invaluable. In a way VIDA is the first film I’ve produced, at least in the sense that VIDA is the first film I made that needed producing. Be Water, and the other films I worked on at Dodge and beyond, for the most part went down pretty smoothly, and seem so tame and trivial from a production standpoint compared to all we went through during our little robot film.
From naively wanting to create the most ambitious AP in Dodge, to ultimately producing what has undoubtedly been one of the film school’s most chaotic thesis, and then resorting to finish said film on our own, it has been quite the bumpy ride. Throughout it all I could not have asked for a more wonderful crew, the people crazy enough to embark on this adventure with me; whose talents I’ve seen flourish and convene towards the common purpose of The Film.
On behalf of our entire crew, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I hope you enjoy our movie.
