College Movies cover the years when I attended UMass Boston, from 2000 to 2005 (age 19 to 23). Although there aren't any movies past early 2004 on here (late in college I started doing the 48 Hour Film Project, but those movies have their own section). Most of these were for video classes with Ann Torke, except Dirty Dino and the Lackluster video, which were made just for fun.

An Evening with the Dirty Dino was inspired after I took my $1.50 Value Village dinosaur stuffed animal / robot to Burning Man 2003. In the dome of our camp, the Dirty Dino earned his name after he got his jollies on top of Jeff's rainbow dog. So a few months later I went over to the Redtail loft, and while the members there were having a somewhat serious meeting, I was in the back room videotaping my dinosaur having his way with a whole basket full of stuffed animals. The robotical movement of the Dirty Dino was enough hump to cause riotous laughter out on the playa, but on camera I quickly realized that I needed to give the Dino a little extra thrust. So if you want to see the Dirty Dino's actual robot moves, you'll just have to catch him in real life. (This movie isn't for showing kids).

Cast & Crew: The Dirty Dino, other stuffed animals and puppets, Joed Polly.

Circle

Circle was another school project for my video class at UMass. I day dreamed up the first scene of this movie on my many walks to school. I built the rest of the story around this, which might partially explain some of the weirdness of this movie. Thematically I was also thinking about psychotropic medications and whether the before or after effect (the reality for that person) was more desirable. As for the circle motif, the story is circular, and there are lots of circles in the movie. I even made the frame a circle, since I was bored with the 4:3 mini-DV rectangle frame. Of course the circle is still in a rectangle frame...

Cast & Crew: Ben Kram, Ellyn Stokes, Carmella Roy Kearsley, Andrew Sewell, Joed Polly, Zeb Polly.

The soundtrack (all except one track) was made by Zeb. It can be found here.

Sleepy Town Manufacture: Latatoo (Lackluster remix)

This is a music video I made for the Finnish electronic musician, Lackluster, for the remix he made of a track called 'Latatoo' from the artist, Sleepytown Manufacture. The footage used in the movie was taken when I was too tired to keep driving and Zeb took over -- on a drive from Seward to Fairbanks, Alaska, in late summer. I was pretty proud of the editing job I did on this, but unfortunately the footage is rather silly, there's not really a story at all, and it was shot in long exposure mode, so it looks like it plays at 5fps or something. But it looks kinda cool. I don't think Esa (Lackluster) thought much of it, but this is still one of my favorite movies to watch. You can see it on Youtube now as well, and vote some stars for it, although the viewing quality is better here.

Cast & Crew: Joed Polly, Zeb Polly.

Four Days

Four Days was yet another school project. This is a good example of back when I based movies around visual ideas I had, so at times it may seem more like a music video (classic for the children of the 80s). I had just met Jess a few weeks prior to making this movie when I was attempting to make a video club at UMass. She said she was an actress and the rest is history. This movie is about a young woman who feels likes she is going to die soon, and her dreams of floating doors and sarcastic foxes don't help the matter. My favorite part of this movie are the dreams, the music video scenes, and most of all, the bonus 'poem video' after the credits. The poem is in the villanelle form.

Cast & Crew: Jess Hunt, Fern DeOliveira, Eli Collins, Joed Polly

Project 2 - Joed and Dewi

I never officially named this movie, since it was always more of a class assignment in my mind. It's quite amusing though. It starts out as a documentary about a documentary of Dewi and I interviewing people at UMass about drugs in the school, particularly PCP. Dewi seems to want to make it about shoes instead. The first nine minutes may seem a little slow, but the ending makes it all well worth while. Some fun facts: I wrote the "script" a few minutes before meeting up with Dewi to videotape this. We had no person running the camera for us, so we sometimes set up the shot and estimated whether we were in the frame or not (this is more impressive if you watch the ending). Every shot was taken in one take, and shot in the course of a couple of hours. And it probably shows!

Cast & Crew: Joed Polly, Dewi Simanjuntak, Dereck Mangus, and two dudes that I had classes with but forget their names...

Various Girl Videos

This was sort of an odd project that I did for school. I forget the exact premise, but basically people shot some footage and then randomly got someone else's footage to edit. What I got was 15 minutes of home-video-style footage of this one guy's daughter doing little girl things. At first I was a little annoyed that there was so little to work with, but in the end it turned out I was more free to do whatever I wanted than if I got, say, interview footage or something. So I cut up every useful looking shot and divided it into four categories: happy, evil, hyperdance, and sleepy. Then I chose appropriate music and edited each segment to the mood. My favorites are the middle two, the evil and dance ones. The Lackluster remix of Machinedrum's 'izey rael' track fits wonderfully in the last segment.

Cast & Crew: Joed Polly. I can't remember the girl's name or the father's. The father shot the video.

A Blink Away

A Blink Away was another school project. It is also another amensia movie (sorry). The only difference is that I made the movie first-person, so the audience gets to see the world through the confused amnesia guy's eyes, including slightly out of focus peripheral vision and blinking. Yes blinking! Luckily my actor's were good at improvation, but unfortunately a few cheeseball lines I came up with still made it into the final movie. Waleed does an excellent job as the med student. My biggest regret is having to, at the last minute, use some random footage of my friend Scott Ledbetter for the main character's memories of his friend. Some new footage would have been infinitely better. It was fun informing Scott he was in a movie I just finished though. Anyway, the movie has a cool dark feel to it and some entertaining editing weirdness.

Cast & Crew: Luke Matkins, Rebecca Mease, Waleed Anbar, Ethan O'Connor, Joed Polly, and Scott Ledbetter (unbeknownst to him).

Wake

Oh where to start with Wake? I actually spent a decent amount of time of this movie, probably more than I should admit. I made this movie at about the same time as Reversed, since I told my video teacher I was going to make two final project movies, the second for extra credit. Wake is about a man who apparently has a lot of stress and goes a little crazy and starts seeing lots of stuff. Being delusional he lives in his own little reality, and I think I was attempting to show that this was the *only* reality for him. So if it's his only reality (even though it's false) isn't it still real in a way? Unfortunately I left any depth there may have been to the story in my head, and in fact, it is a fairly immature take on mental disorders. I was going for visuals and weirdness, so it might impress some 13 year olds or something. Oh and the blood looks like strawberry jelly. Sorry about that.

Cast & Crew: Joed Polly, Ethan O'Connor, Heather Mease, Scott Ledbetter.

Reversed

Reversed is a movie with no dialogue and miminal story. I really could just call this a music video if it wasn't for the title and credits. I had Becky walk around Boston backwards and then I made the footage be backwards, so Becky appears to be moving forwards while everything else moves backwards. Basically it's just nice to look at. I was surpised how normal Becky's backwards-walking looked when it was reversed, especially considering she was wearing heels. I actually made storyboards for the key scenes in this movie. They are still kicking around somewhere.

Cast & Crew: Rebecca Mease, Ethan O'Connor, Heather Mease, Joed Polly.

Media Make Up

Media Make Up was the first of eight movies made for various video classes at UMass Boston. It was a group project with four members, although me and Justin basically ended up doing most everything. The assignment was to make a movie using "found footage", which could be anything from old archive footage, to brand new stuff you captured off of cable television. The idea was then to create a narrative or message using that footage. Justin came up with the basic idea and we went from there. Some group members brought in some VHS movies like Weird Science and I captured over an hour of television crap over the course of a few days. The theme of our movie was the objectification of women in the media. Our professor, Ann Torke, liked it enough to show this as an example to future classes for the same project, but had to stop after getting only found footage movies about the objectification of women. Hearing that made me chuckle three times in a row.

Cast & Crew: Joed Polly, Justin Perilli