Long Distance

Long Distance was produced in my Senior Spring in the last Film course I took at Lafayette College. The class was focused on production, particularly Experimental Cinema. Our assignments in this class were primarily self-made: our professor allowed us to create the parameters or "limitations" in which our projects would be produced. This assignment in particular asked us to impose obstacles or limitations onto ourselves in order to stimulate our creativity. 

​

I instituted two limitations into this video: one of space and the other in a form of media. I chose to use voicemails as the only featured audio. With this as a foundation, I found myself faced with another obstacle: I had recently moved back home after Lafayette had closed due to the pandemic. With filming locations and travel limited, I decided to use only my house as a film set. The combination of the voicemails and the shots of my childhood home created a dialogue of love and family history that exists over distance. 

​

The voicemails had been collected over the three years of my college experience. I had commuted for half of that time, and while I was commuting my dad and I were sort of roommates. He would often call me on his way to or from work, and if I was in class or busy doing something else, he'd always leave a voicemail. I never deleted them because I found them hilarious, and when people asked about my dad the voicemails were always a great piece of him to point to. This audio was then coupled with images from my home that were iconically related to my dad: his old fraternity jacket, his favorite spot on the couch, the liquor he kept on the kitchen counter but rarely drank. Slowly, the piece became a love letter to my dad. 

​

This experimental piece became very reflective and even meditative. I had spent most of my life in the house on Greenwich St, and in all the time that I had lived there, my dad did too. However, in the Spring of 2020, I was unexpectedly moving back to a house without him in it–he had recently moved to Virginia for work. The confusion and distortion of time that existed in those first few months months of social distancing and quarantine was compounded by the new separation of my family. So, when presented with a project that asked us to focus on obstacles, I could easily name several: time, space, distance. And thus, this piece was born. 

​

This short film was created using a Canon T5i, voicemails from an iPhone X, and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.