Interview with a Vampire

So Matt, Where did the inspiration for this project come from?

A lot of the inspiration for my blog posts came from experiences and endeavors that occurred in my apartment in the past year. Its the first apartment I've ever lived in on my own, so it I feel it will always hold a special type of resonance in my heart. I wanted to do a project that captured my so called life and times within this madhouse that I call home, and one that was influenced by my experience in the "Sense of Place" course. Why do you choose to do a movie, and what type of effects where you using to distort the images within the video?

First and foremost we have an amazing video camera in my apartment at all times and it just felt right to use it as a way to capture place and time. Also, because we are all moving out of the apartment in a couple weeks, my roommates and I wanted to capture some last footage of the apartment to put in the archives of our lives. In class this semester the videos always helped me to put a visual perspective on place, and so I wanted to create a moving image in honor of all the random clips and footage that helped make the class what is was. The project was filmed and then imported into final cut pro, a quite complex and overwhelming editing system used in the production of almost any professional shooting whether TV or movies. In post production my friend Jay and I set out to match cuts from the footage with the rhythm of the song "Cosmic Charlie" by the Grateful Dead. We had about two hours of footage to get through and we ended up with about a four minute and thirty second video. The video seems quite distorted in a lot of areas and this is by no means a mistake. The distortion of the video is meant to mirror my twisted sense of reality as well as to invoke the ideas of some of the last books the class read this semester. We played with the notion of time by speeding up the frames per second, and then used blurring techniques to give it an even stranger feel. How did you learn to dance so brilliantly?

Years upon years of watching music videos on MTV. I also think it comes kind of naturally to me in the moment. I don't let the camera affect my dancing; for me its more about spirituality than anything else-connecting with ancient mystical spirits floating in the stratosphere. Now that the weather is getting better do you actually plan on stepping outside of your apartment into the greater world beyond?

The last few months of my life I have steadily grown crazier by being forced to live indoors. This insanity has shaped the projects and writings I have done throughout the semester whether in a positive or negative light. But yes sadly enough there is a world beyond the doors of my apartment and I plan on investigating it in this springtime glory.

Location