Student Films

These are films I made at UNC. Unless otherwise noted, they are wholly my own work.


This was my final project for my animation class. The idea grew out of an insect curio cabinet turned burlesque show. I love the irony of Wilde's treatment and the heritage of the story. Salome was to be Norma Desmond's swan song in Sunset Blvd.
This piece uses basic motion of matted stock photographs to create a sort of brief animated musical. My friend TJ Ward created the music.
This was entirely improvised as a means of demonstrating the use of masking in adding a fake sense of depth to photographic backgrounds. I added the audio in the middle later, having realized that off-screen action is the ultimate animation "cheat," where you get to pass along all the work to the sound designer. Sadly I had forgotten that I was also the sound designer.
My goal here was to create something hypnotic and visually pleasing. Again, TJ Ward created the music.
This is a very short presentation of a time lapse project in the style of a video blog entry. One goal of the project was to become more comfortable with delivering prepared texts, as you can hear in the commentary in this clip. I wrote the video capture software using the Processing framework so that I could reduce the noise level in the extremely low light setting.
This is a short flash animation that was meant to give life to simple geometric shapes, in this case a square and a circle. I used yet another genre framework since it's so much easier to work within time constraints when the genre is doing so much of the work for you.
This demonstrates my l33t editing skilz and some of my style of humor. It is a video thank you card that we produced over the summer as a token of appreciation for a significant monetary gift from Scion Films. David Rabinowitz, who interned for Scion, gave me twenty minutes of interview footage and I did the rest. Dave will be the first to admit he's not a camera man, and his hands shake visibly when eating salad, much less trying to hold a camera steady. Now talk to him about screenwriting, that's a whole other story.
This is a photographic story board for a short horror film. Appearing are Elizabeth Friend and Ian O'Hagan, a couple of friends of mine.
This is a video realization of the concept I developed previously as the photographic story board. Since shooting video requires lighting during night-time shooting, I reworked the story around the same concept so that a daytime exterior could be used. This was done in Final Cut without the benefit of After Effects, which would have provided for more possibilities.
This piece hardly qualifies as a film. Primarily it's a formal exercise in expressive montage. It is notable for its photographic qualities and its disquieting effect despite the quotidian subject matter.
Contact joey at ibiblio dot org