Artist’s Note:
This is a selected portfolio, showcasing a number of styles and formats that I have been working in for the last few years. These range from educational videos, to promotional and fundraising pieces, to experimental art explorations. As with any aspect of my artistic life, what I produce stems from what I need, what I want, or what interests me. This openness to shifting style stems from my decades spent working in theatre, where every show required a different mindset and a different skillset. As an Artistic Director, a Playwright, an Actor, a Sound Designer, or a human being, I allow myself to focus on the task at hand and let what I learn then feed what comes next. This includes commissions, engagements, and projects done for the simple joy of making, in mediums as varied as live-performance, standard media, sound, 360 video, and virtual reality.
Intro to Theatre
In 2019 I was tasked with turning the Intro to Theatre Course from face-to-face into an online format for the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of Montana, first as a 6 week summer intensive and then as a 15 week course for Spring and Fall semesters. To that end, I created an introductory video for each week, prepping the students for the materials that they would be engaging in for the week.
Missoula Interfaith Collaborative
For the past few years I’ve been working occasionally with Missoula Interfaith Collaborative, shooting and editing videos for various projects. Of the three videos above, the top two were part of a series that I shot, edited, recorded sound for, and created motion graphics for. The third video was a last minute promo that I was asked to help with, for a conference of non-profits. I was sent the video and photos and stitched them together into a video that introduced the idea of what Missoula Works does.
International Engagement Office, U of M
This video is one of a pair of 360 videos that I created for the International Engagement Office at the University of Montana. This video is a partial ride-through of the UM campus in Missoula. The other video is a more complete tour of the campus. These videos were created as part of a campaign to increase international enrollment at the University of Montana and traveled to conferences around the world, to be shown in a VR headset.
The Proximity Principle
This video is a piece that I created to accompany a paper/lecture on Proximity Principle as it relates to 360 degree filmmaking. It was shot in 360 video and can best be viewed with a VR viewer, but also works great on a phone.
360 Hyperlapse
This video was created during the final week of classwork in Michael Murphy’s Creation of Media Story course. The students were creating their final books for the course, an exploration of the creative process and a dive into the methods created by Lynda Barry.
MA Thesis
This video was created in Unreal Engine as one of a series of landscape and transition videos for the School of Theatre and Dance’s 2020 production of She Kills Monsters, a live theatrical production that ended up moving onto the Zoom platform due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (See my Thesis on the Writing section of this website for lots of details on that process.)
MFA Thesis
A single dancer becomes a multitude in this draft. Dancer: Shenoah Rain
In my thesis this video was presented as part of a video sculpture but can also be viewed independently. It is a 32 minute meditation on the idea of a dancer who is not only dancing with herself, but over the course of time and space becomes both structural and machinelike. The video is created through layering and reversing takes of a single dancer who gifted me 8 performances to the same song. In all, there are 512 layers.
Draft of The Dancer in Motion, an early Draft. Dancer: Jordan Stuber. VO: Aimee Paxton.
My MFA Thesis project is an investigation of the actual and the virtual in a time of social distancing. Combining 360 videos and virtual spaces built in Unreal Engine, the viewer wanders through pieces inspired by the idea that when we can’t be together, the only way to make collaborative art is by dancing with yourself.
This particular piece consists of 4 performances in which Jordan danced to a different song in each quadrant of the space. These areas were masked off to create four individual clones. I created the backing track in Ableton and then edited the video to work synchronously with the backing tracks. This is the flat version of the video. In my thesis showing it was viewed both flat and in 360 on cell phones.
Work with The Wandermiles
Fistfighting on the Phone
I acted as both a producer and cinematographer on this music video for The Wandermiles “Fistfighting on the Phone.”
Cassie and the Star Show
In addition to Associate Producing as well as helping out crewing on this film, I also played the role of The Astronomer, a part in which I got to improv my way through an Astrophysics lecture.