NEAR COMMERCIAL

The neighborhood of Commercial Drive brings back lots of memories for the author of the poem.

NEAR COMMERCIAL is a video poem where I had the pleasure of being one of the Directors, main Editor, Colorist and Actor. For the video poem we spoke to the client about the meaning behind the poem and decided the poem should evoke nostalgia. Because of the color edition on the images and the aspect ratio, this was reached successfully.

Our main problem during this project was trying to capture the feeling of the poem visually and maintaining that throughout the film as well as integrating the real streets the poet speaks of. Due to time constraints it was impossible for all of the shots to be filmed on Commercial Drive so we had to rely on Color edition and matching to create a visual connection between all the images, as well as the CGI towards the end. In the end this problem was fixed by color matching each location individually and then tweaking a custom created filter for each scene where the change in lighting cause it to behave differently.

This was a project for the IAT 344 class in Simon Fraser University. During the creation process me and my colleague Lorena Gracia were in charge of the creation of the visual aspects of the video poem as well as the concept. We came up with a color palette inspired by Wes Anderson and eventually landed on the nostalgic vibe the project has. It is a piece of work that we are both proud of and for which we have been awarded with the "Best Art Direction" and "Best Cinematography" awards in our class.