This piece served as the opening for MassArt Film/Video’s 2023 All School Show. Every year at MassArt, the school takes two weeks to showcase what students have been working. Every normal gallery shuts down, and we all work together to transform the building into a series of screenings and installations where you can get a window into the majors you might never cross paths with.

MassArt Film/Video has long had a policy of accepting everything to the All School Show, no matter what it was. I always loved this, personally, because its so difficult to exhibit time based work. Having a night set aside every year for a screening that anyone in the major can be in is really valuable. It also comes with additional challenges! Because there’s no curation at all, let alone a general theme, it can be really tricky to thread the needle of a memorable- but not distracting- opening title sequence.

The idea to do this one mostly with videography was a practical one. I knew that, with the turnaround time I had, a fully animated intro would be lacking. So the first thing I did was a temp cut. I picked a track I liked, and I tried to naturally feel out where I would want to cut and where I would display the relevant text, based solely on the music. I find when I have to work quickly, laying out the project like this helps the next steps come naturally. There was also something about the persistent, chittering high hats and off kilter live sound in the song that reminded me of commuting in Boston.

Once I had an idea of how many shots I’d need, their rough durations, and the overall rhythm of the edit, I went out to shoot. I love a shoot where I can be editing in my head as I go, and this went exactly like that. I shot this entirely on vintage glass with the widest aperture possible to try to impart some of that dreamlike, hazy, excited quality of riding the T to a show. Once I brought everything back to the editing bay it was a really simple turnaround because most of the hard work was already done. All of the colors for the text were sampled from the video clips they’re on, so they would feel like they belonged in the scene. Finally, a naturalistic color grade helped to keep the intro neutral and calm, which was always one of my main goals for it.