Despite film being as common as it is, throughout my childhood there were many movies I was not allowed to watch. If it was not PG-13, chances were, I had not seen it. As soon as I was in college, I started gorging movies and I loved it. The forbidden fruit aspect of R rated movies made them all the sweeter, no matter how bad or great they were. Cinema is something so prominent in modern society that it is essentially unavoidable. It is something that we may not understand completely yet as an audience can identify what is and what is not cinematic. Throughout this series I use cinematic aspects to challenge what we view as familiar and unfamiliar. Utilizing visual techniques such as letterboxing, color grading, and cinematic lighting I invite my viewers to ponder this complex visual medium. I hope to have the viewer create their own stories for each image or create a story that ties them together. Over the past 4 years I have dove deeper and deeper into the medium learning more and more about cinematography. Utilizing this knowledge, I am creating “film stills” that are much like their subject matter, out of place. In most cases, film stills would have a film that they are promoting. They appear in social media as well as in magazines. They give their audience a sneak peek into what is going to soon come. In my work however, they are simply here. They are bound to no feature, just propaganda to a nonexistent film. A sneak peek to a masterpiece that we will never lay our eyes on.
