*All of the films have no digital effects, enhancements, or alterations and contain raw footage edited together with text and music added.
GREETINGS FROM POINT PLEASANT BEACH, NEW JERSEY
Duration: 12 minutes, 35 seconds.
Greetings from Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey is an autobiographical arthouse film. After living in the South for the past 7 years, far away from home, the bad experiences I had from a failed marriage to lack of opportunity and a lifetime worth of enemies...I finally came home to New Jersey. But instead of going to the North, where I am originally from, I settled on the Jersey Shore where much of my family have moved to. Greetings from Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey expresses how the ocean seems to have a cleansing effect on my current state in life. Free from distractions and negativity, I can finally focus on my priorities due to the opportunities in the region, the pleasant, developed, and prosperous community on the shore as well as releasing a lifetime worth of tension and conflicts watching and swimming onto the crashes of the waves.
BEASTS OF THE ABYSS
Duration: 14 minutes, 42 seconds.
Beasts of the Abyss is an arthouse film shot in a documentary manner. Although this is not my first motion picture project, I consider Beasts of the Abyss to be my very first serious film executed professionally. The work entails my longstanding fascination with the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. When I first gazed my eyes on a whale shark for the first time in person, the beast did not even seem like a real creature, more like a fantastical creation from a film like Avatar or from the books of Jules Verne. At first I started to photograph the whale sharks, then I started to write about them, which led to making assemblages depicting the beasts, finally, I decided to dedicate a film to the whale sharks. The concept of the film highlights the ancient, mythic, titanic, and fantastical elements which are available to us, such as the ethereal coral depicted in the film. Like the whale shark, we all yearn to be as powerful and not bound by the constraints of contemporary society. In essence, I wanted to express how some sea creatures and vegetation can appear and give off an aura of fantasy, especially whale sharks, manta rays, jellyfish, and coral. Through careful editing, fantasy-based audio, and focused filming, I reveal a realm which we could imagine in our dreams, but does indeed exist in reality.