Boxed Out

A video like this is something that I've wanted to work on for the longest time. I have always been fascinated by the ideas of choose-your-own-adventure stories and love pieces of media that take on the challenge of telling stories in this way. Creating something like that has been my dream since starting in this program, and I figured that I would attempt to make one as my final project at the University at Buffalo.

I wanted to create something that wouldn't necessarily be a student-type piece of work. Looking at what a lot of my other peers have done in the past, I wanted to make something with a lot more narrative set into it. The only other piece of mine like this where the narrative takes precedence is To Get a Job. I wanted to take that approach to creating this and expand greatly upon what I liked about it. From there, I wanted to add more action, more locations, and more emotional beats between characters. From that, I ended up with a gang story where two members from a gang go on this wild adventure together. Something like that is very different from much of the other work that I see, and I'm happy to expand past that boundary more.

I am also really happy with the actors that I got to work with me on this. We spent five days shooting footage across ten different locations, and all of them were very flexible and professional. Having their support through all of this made the shoot go super smoothly. With a script that constantly weaves between parallel lines in different timelines of events, it easily got confusing where we were, but at the end, each actor understood my vision and gave an amazing performance.

Editing proved to be its own problem, like it usually is. Instead of editing one linear path, I had 15 mini-short films to compile together. Thar hardest task was making the transition from one video flow seamlessly into two different videos, those depending on what the "player" of the video choose. With each having their own style to them, condensing things down took a lot more time than expected. However, watching the rough cuts in some resemblance of the final gave me the confidence that things were going correctly. 

Looking back at everything that I did, I am really proud of what I accomplished. Over only two months, I created a script, all the branching paths, coded a program from scratch to host the video, shot, edited, and finalized this piece. For something as monumental as this project was, I still would love to do more projects like this in the future.