This was originally published on April 20, 2016 on my old blog site.

 

As with so many things at college, I don’t know how it really started. Dr. Williams was a new English professor on campus, and he’d been gracious enough to appear in a short film that my friend Andrew and I made, mostly because he had Andrew in class, and the two of them got along well. I’d also met Dr. Williams via email, coordinating with him to design posters for this event he was starting on campus: the Geneva Reading Series.

Sometime after all of this, Dr. Williams approached me with an idea–posters could only accomplish so much; in order for the GRS to be as big as he wanted it to be, there would have to be more and better advertising. What the GRS needed was a trailer, Dr. Williams decided, and since I was the guy who was always running around campus with a camera, I was the person he asked to help him make it. I barely knew him well, then, but my experiences had been fun enough for me to know that this was something that I wanted to do…so we made it.

Ever since that first one, we haven’t really stopped. The GRS averages two events per semester, with two trailers per event. Including that first video and the one published today (seen at the top of this post) we’ve made a total of twenty pieces of video content for the GRS–twenty little pieces of art, hilarity, and madness. I’m convinced that these trailers are pieces of art (though with very little thanks to my skill or involvement, the genesis of these pieces most often comes from some dark corner of Dr. Williams’s mind where few, if any besides himself, dare to tread), and there is certainly hilarity present, even if you don’t come to Geneva or know all of the participants, and, well, madness is probably the easiest of these qualities to see on display in each of these films. Some are better than others, in a variety of ways, but all of them share a sense of fun, and the characteristic creativity and hectic energy of the PhD who started this all up in the first place.

For almost all of the videos we made, Dr. Williams would send me the script beforehand, so that I knew what I was getting myself into, and could plan ahead. I’ve never told him, though I’m sure he maybe caught on eventually, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually looked at any of those scripts, even for the ones that I was acting in. The adventures and crazy things we did during the making of these videos was too good–I didn’t want to spoil the insanity by knowing beforehand what would be required of me; instead, I preferred to show up on the day, make things up as I went along, and mostly just sit back and enjoy the creative trip that I’d gotten myself involved in.

I can’t say it for certain, but I think this was probably the best way to go about the process of making these.

If I’d have looked at the scripts beforehand, or actually tried to plan out what we were going to do in these films, I think I’d have been too overwhelmed, too doubtful. Sometimes reading things on the page makes you too strongly question your ability to actually pull them off, and I didn’t want my doubt to stifle the creative work Dr. Williams was cooking up for us. I preferred to show up on set, hear what was being asked of me, and then do everything in my power to make that happen onscreen. There were many, many days where I left a shoot with a sense of anxiety looming over my shoulder, wondering whether or not I’d be able to deliver on the sense or effect we were trying to create with the footage we’d just shot.

We made lots of mistakes, and did things that made the editing sometimes incredibly difficult or complicated, but I can only remember one occasion where an intended effect was deemed too complicated or time-consuming to actually come to fruition–and that scene was too long and probably would have been cut from the final product anyways, truthfully.

In making these movies we hardly ever hit the deadlines that were asked of us–the movies were always in chapel on time to be seen by the student body, but when it was requested that we get the videos finished four or five days ahead of time so that people in authority could approve them or ensure their technical compatibility with the chapel computer system…well, we may have fallen short of those requests a time or two. But we made the movies happen; we made people laugh (a lot, I might add); we made people curious about just what the GRS was and what it was about; we accomplished what we set out to accomplish…whatever that was.

Now, twenty videos later, circumstances are forcing me to move on from GRS projects. Moving to Texas isn’t exactly conducive to making four videos per semester in Pennsylvania, unfortunately.

Working on the last two videos for this semester was bittersweet (and far more bitter than sweet), and so I put off even starting the actual editing of them for as long as I possibly could. I just didn’t want it to end, even though I badly wanted to see how the scripts we’d filmed would actually play out on screen (not because I was in them, of course, but because the dialog was genuinely funny–Dr. Williams gets all the credit, once again). But of course time kept marching on, and necessity finally forced me to sit down and get to work.

This morning, I sat in chapel as my final GRS video played, and I got to hear the laughter of my peers and friends once again. That’s what makes my job so fun–I’m convinced there’s no greater feeling than sitting and watching people laugh at something you’ve helped make; making someone cry or think with something you’ve made is great, too, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something about laughter…

I’ve been thinking about this blog post for a while, thinking about the end of this particular stage of my life, and thinking about the GRS, and the GRS videos, and all that they’ve meant to me over the last two and a half years. And what I’ve come away with is a tremendous sense of gratitude for having been here in this place, at this time, to do these things. Through these projects I’ve met many people I never would have otherwise, and formed friendships that are going to last for a very long time. I’ve been pushed in so many different creative directions, and learned a lot about the tools that I use to make films, as well as my own abilities and instincts through the challenges I was presented with in these projects. And of course I’ve gotten the incredible reward of watching and listening to other people enjoy the work that we’ve done in these videos.

The actual GRS events are a time of love for the written word, and they are always, without fail, beautiful, and fun, and amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in one of them, but have had the even greater fortune of having been involved in many ways behind the scenes through these videos. I really hope that this last one isn’t actually my last one. The GRS is something special, not just to me, but to all of Geneva. There’s an energy and a passion in these videos and in the readers that perform at each event that you just don’t find anywhere else. I’ve loved being a part of these, and though I’m sad to say goodbye to them (for now), I’m mostly just pleased to have been a part of it all, providing me with memories, experiences, and footage (real blackmail material, in some cases) that I’ll never forget.

This has likely been incredibly rambling, and so if you’ve made it this far I both applaud you and apologize. My main message is this: the GRS is special. If you’re around Geneva at all and have the time and even a little bit of the inclination–enjoy it.

• Uncategorized