Unfortunately I’ve reached my monthly video limit for Vimeo and Youtube is blocking my videos on grounds of copyright so I may have to make this without the videos themselves embedded.

Epigraph: This was one of the first exercises where I really felt proud of the final product. I took the reveal of the alien in The Thing and overlaid it with a section of the Bible that I think is Revelation 6:8 (the one about the horsemen). I was particularly proud of how I worked in the ability to make certain words stay longer than others, by making them separate text boxes but making them line up with the rest of the text, and I feel that I was able to make that work really well with dramatic timing. I do think that having the text slide in from outside of the frame, while it helped satisfy the technical exploration of the assignment, was kind of goofy.

Multiscreen: For this one, I combined the scene of the assimilated Bennings in The Thing with the doppelganger encounter in Scavenger’s Reign. I did have to cut out a large chunk of the sequence from The Thing, as while it is a very good movie it is also a very slow movie. I do think that, in my effort to demonstrate and expand my keyframing abilities, this one was somewhat goofy in execution. Nevertheless, I do think the narrative parallels made between the alien doppelgangers and their deaths by fire were interesting, and I am proud of how I lined up the sound of lighting flares in The Thing with the ignition of the tent in Scavenger’s Reign.

Visual Deformation: This one is a deformation of the scene where Norris is revealed to be an alien in The Thing. This is likely my most simple work technically, as all I do is mirror one side of the screen along a vertical axis. However, I found that I liked it a lot, especially within the context of the ‘deformed’ nature of the aliens in the movie. Mirroring often not only made the creature more monstrous (sometimes giving it two heads, sometimes erasing the head in-between the monstrous parts), but it also helped to make the humans look monstrous, which was an interesting concept thematically.

The Christmas Colors of Fear: This is my video essay in response to “The Color of Fear“, which analyzed Green as a color associated with the supernatural and horror. I approached it through trying to explain the relative absence of green in The Thing, and the prevalence of the color red in exchange. My favorite part personally was the opening sequence, where I not only was able to imitate the original essay’s introduction, but was also able to break the 4th wall to explain the imitation and segue into the content of the response. The open-endedness of the essay was deliberate, as I felt unsatisfied at more-or-less copying the format of the original to explain the color red, and I felt that combining the color theories and creating a chicken-and-the-egg question about horror philosophy was a good way to leave the audience considering the principles laid out in the essay.

‘Behold, A Man!’: My final essay was focused on what I see as a connective theme between The Thing and Annihilation, that of human identity, imitation, and monstrousness. This was partially borne of convenience, as I was watching Annihilation for another class, and noticed some similarities between it and The Thing; both heavily feature mimics/doppelgangers that mutate humanity, and both have ambiguous endings where the last two survivors could very well not be human. In the essay, I present arguments for the mimics both as overtly monstrous and as basically human in their own way, creating a dichotomy between a “monster” identity and a “man” identity. The essay is effectively split into two parts: the trailer, which became the intro and outro, and the body of the argument/exploration. The intro/outro were very fun to work on, as it involved much editing on the beat of the music, “Little Dark Age”, with some use of deformation techniques. The body of the essay was in many ways several pecha kuchas, with a heavy amount of epigraphs. Since my response essay had been narration-heavy, I wanted to lean away from that in this one, hut since the concepts were fairly complicated, I needed a significant amount of text. I arrived at a solution that was reminiscent of poetry, striking a balance between being understandable and simple/abstract enough to not detract form the scenes of the movies.