Xiantieer Xu

When I chose to make a video I thought I was giving myself a challenge that wasn’t easy. Until now, my exposure to filming was simply shooting and editing with my cell phone. When I got really systematic about learning and creating, it became a lot easier and I realized that real creativity is not something that can be done in a short period of time.

Looking back, the shooting of my first short play Curiosity Comes With Great Risk now seems to have a lot of areas where I was able to identify shortcomings and correct them. At first I tried to convey the story I wanted to tell in a few short scenes, but found that it wasn’t that easy. I tried to use my mind to communicate with the actors, but it was often more difficult because I didn’t express myself well. Because of this movie I wanted to run the plot through the character’s greed, ignoring the warnings, and then losing his belongings. One of the obvious drawbacks was that I didn’t show what greed was and the character’s loss of the item in a clear way.

On the contrary, when I do my own appearances as well as my own shoots I become comfortable with it. And I think that’s what happened when I made Wax Snowboard. I shot the video all by myself, and I did it without any help from anyone. I know it’s not something to brag about, but in this day and age of the internet, self-filming and editing is a very common skill. That said, I felt more comfortable shooting by myself than I have in the past. I don’t have to care if the actors understand the script or if they know how to interpret it. I could shoot this video over and over again, and I didn’t have to care if I disturbed anyone. But I know that a good video can’t be created by myself, it has to be a team effort. And that’s what made Time Trap work so well for me.

Time Trap is something that I think has a lot of logic and coherence to it, and Aaron and I had a lot of discussions and script edits and rewrites while we were working on it. There were a few hiccups during the process, but they were easily resolved. And of course, the actors were able to bring a sense of humor to the story. I chose to slow down the video editing process a little bit so that I could discover more details that needed to be addressed. And this approach allowed me to discover areas where I could be more creative in my video production. Since this is a suspenseful video that needs to have something to get the viewer involved, I added the sound of a clock running at the end of the video, which is a sound effect that is used throughout the video. The idea was to make the viewer think that the video was going to end and then realize that the loop was still going on, and it didn’t seem to end with the end of the video. And that was my original intent in designing it that way.

In retrospect, I still have a lot of room for improvement in video production, and it will take more creativity on my part to realize some of the things I could have done better.