Brody's Guide to the College Admissions Essay

Essay #3

Analog

Although my relationship with video started before I was in high school, my tools have remained the same: beige Mac G3, video 8 camera, VCR, and AV cables. Most people making video today are using digital equipment. I’m still in analog. Quality is lost, and the picture that is finally imported looks like it was shot in the ‘70s.
Analog is all give and take. If the computer does not want to render full screen video, I just reduce the picture by half. If the computer will only play a few frames before it cuts out, I’ll go take a walk. Working this way may be frustrating, but when the video performs, diced into tiny fast-moving segments, and the music gets poured over the top as if it is directing it, that’s when I’m satisfied.
Analog is grainy, gritty, and shiny. Analog is beautiful the same way some graffiti art is, because it’s real. These are all the things I love about it. And these are the reasons why analog is the place to which I return year after year.
I am not proud of my first efforts in film. The camera was my toy—a diversion to pass time, to occupy myself in a creative way. But these early films gave me experience. I gradually gained both the patience and maturity to create something I’d want to show to people other than my snickering friends.
My first real attempt, Gone Wrong, was a clumsy, hardly-edited, three-scene piece about a kid who gets hit in the “fundamentals.” The soundtrack starts with an upbeat jam by Chick Corea but then shifts to a melancholy Gershwin song for the agony scene. Although the music was appropriate, it was not synched to details. The whole piece was unfocused and immature. I had gone out to have fun, not to create a work of art.
Though Gone Wrong was childish, it was my initiation into the feeling, rhythm, and method of editing. It was my first taste, my first negotiation, my first exchange. It was also my last film that would have dialog and an artificially-created story. Through my next two attempts, I realized I was much better at recording real life than creating one of my own.
When I look back on the days of Gone Wrong, I see myself as a child trying language for the first time. I made mistakes, but I was learning.
About a year later, I spent a Sunday taping my mom endlessly watering the garden, and my brother and dad intently building a soapbox car. I put the scene of my mom, and the scene of my brother and dad, into separate boxes on the same screen. The constant jumps between the two jaggedly-cut shots were a great way to show my family’s compulsiveness. Each lasted only a few seconds before shifting angles. I chose Miles Davis’ “Springville” as a soundtrack. It is a fanciful, carefree piece with a melancholic undertone. Then I edited all the quick cuts to match the music. The movie ended on the last note of the song.
Sunday helped to establish my style. When I finished with it, I had an excellent technical and creative grasp of my workspace. However, as much as Sunday was a huge step forward from Gone Wrong, it was still immature. The quick cuts made the film almost overedited. It was as if, in my quest to show my family’s obsessiveness, I had emulated them, becoming obsessive myself in the intricate construction of the film.
I entered Sunday in a student festival. I was surprised when it won first place in the nonfiction category. I think it won because, unlike many of the entries, it wasn’t blatant. Sunday was about a family doing what families do. It was fanciful, escapist, and soothing. I could make subtle reference to conflict, without beating the ideas to death.
The award gave me confidence to return once again to my place. By now, my old beige G3 and video 8 camera had become dated. Almost every entry in the South Bay Student Video Festival that year was made in digital video. People were telling me to upgrade, but I held out. My workspace and my equipment were my close companions. Migrating to digital would be a betrayal. I liked being an iconoclast, a stalwart for an obsolete medium. Plus, I loved that grainy quality of the videos. By going to the festival, and comparing my work to what else was out there, I realized that technology wasn’t the only thing that set me apart. Not only were the technology and the methodology iconoclastic, so was I.
Sophomore year, I went on a trip to Las Vegas. There, I saw people mindlessly attached to slot machines. They weren’t just playing, they had become robo-comatose regressed baby life forms captivated by the glowing lights and hypnotizing sounds. This gave me an idea for my next film. Unlike Sunday, however, I had a plan for this movie.
This idea slowly became Slot. When I got back home, I once again approached my workspace. After Sunday, I knew how to work. I selected clips of the people who looked the most robotic, and started going through my CDs for music. By now, I had learned that, for me, editing, feeling, and mood for a film is patterned by, and expressed through the music. Even the length of the movie itself it defined by the length of the song. I decided to set Slot to Django Reinhardt’s “Blues Clair,” an upbeat jazz guitar composition that gave the film an ironic, turn-of-the-century feeling that complemented my trademark herky-jerky analog style--itself the byproduct of using old equipment. “Blues Clair” was perfect. In addition to its repetitive style, which aurally resembles slot machines, its structure virtually determined the outcome. For example, I set one of Reinhardt’s guitar arpeggios to a video segment of a lounge pianist playing an arpeggio. Slot was smooth, gliding along to the swaying tempo.
According to Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, the world becomes less about you as you grow up. Gone Wrong was all about me. It was an infantile view of existence. Sunday was an insular look at family relationships, but still mostly about me. Slot, however, took a stance about the world and how we, as human beings, inhabit it.
Last year, my parents traded in the old beige G3 for a new computer, and my 10-year-old brother started using the camera for his own wacky ends. My equipment was disappearing. Even so, I think I’m ready to upgrade. I know that I will always keep my analog aesthetic. And when nobody remembers what it was like before digital video, the sounds of Django and Miles will ring in my ears, and I will remember what it was like to make something grainy, gritty, and real.

This author was accepted to the University of Chicago; his essay, about his evolution as a filmmaker, was undoubtedly a positive force in his application.

This piece has almost everything we look for in an effective application essay. We’re shown that the author has passion in a particular field, and has pursued that passion aggressively and with some success. We learn something interesting about the author that probably wasn’t entirely revealed in the rest of the application. This essay is also very interesting, which never hurts. The reader can’t help but learn a little about filmmaking—not only technically, but also how a young filmmaker views his craft.

Far more than the previous two essays, this author focuses on the substance of what he’s accomplished in a particular area.

 

Back

Brody's Guide-Table of Contents

Next