When I created this movie, I did it in such a short ammount of time, that I didn't have time for anything. I filmed it in one night, edited it in about an hour, and sped over to the film festival, 30 minutes late.

In my previous expiriences, I've noticed that most of my better works are made faster than the ones I spend a lot of time on. Maybe that's why I excel in photography. It's that immediacy that attracts me. That's probably why I don't enjoy painting and drawing as much as I could. It's just too long and drawn out compared to Photo or Digital Image Design. There aren't much results in the period of a day. It's also the technical aspect that gets me. Anything involving my fumbling hands isn't going to turn out that well. I really think I just need more practice.

I thought over 5 days what I wanted to do for my final project. Nothing was coming to me, at all. I had scenes in my head I wanted to do, and my ideas became more complex. But the more complex they became, the time I had to do them was decreasing.

So I abandoned my original ideas, which weren't even that good. And then I thought of making a cover for my movie. It'd be fast, easy and I had all the resources (myself) I needed at home.

The process of making it only took a day, which was just the ammount that I needed. Thankfully I have photoshop at home, otherwise I would have been screwed.

I took all the images that appear on the cover myself. I think the part that's most impressive is how I photoshopped myself 4 times into the same picture. I'd seen it done before, and I'd always wanted to try it, but I never had a reason to. But I think this was a just reason. I think it adds to the movie, since it's impossibe to see us all together in the movie.

I looked at other DVD cases for inspiration. I think the biggest inspiration was the cover for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. It's just a picture of her face and eyes, I I employed that in my design.

I also edited the colors. I made them have that blue tint that you always see in those cool pictures everbody likes.

I've always been interested in surrealism. Actually, I think it was surrealism that got me into art in the first place. It was in photography that I did a project on night photography, and almost all of them were surrealists. I studied Bill Brandt and Man Ray, and from that point on, I think all of my work has been influenced by them. So surrealism has been a strong point in my art since Photo 1.

This was my first strictly surreal project that I've done. All of my night photos I think can be considered surrealistic, but I've never taken them with the intent of them being surreal. It's just something that I started to notice, and I think that's better than trying to achieve surrealism, since it's more of an extension of my own ideas. My ideas just are surreal.

But back to my image. It took a long time for me to figure out what I wanted to do. I looked through all the books I had; a book on surrealism, a Man Ray photo collection, a Dali collection, a Bill Brandt collection. But it was finally in my book on Japanese Photography of the last century that I saw the image that inspired it all. It was a very grainy photo of a man on the horizon line, on top of a snowy hill, while it was snowing. I thought it was awesome, so I thought of what I could do wit ha scene like that.

My next idea came from a School of the Art Institute of Chicago information booklet. There were many picture of art being deconstructed, so I wanted to try that with one of my pictures. Sadly, the photo I used doesn't have much unity to it, but it fit in with the background and overall colors.

Probably like 5 years ago, I saw Garbage's music video for the song "Push It", and in it, there were men made of static snow that you see on the televison. This stuck with me, and I used it.

Overall, this turned out nicely. It seems minimal, and I like it like that. Something I had a hard time with was the proportions, but since it is surreal, the proportions don't matter as much. However, it does take away from the realism, which was very important in the most famous surrealists artworks (Dali, Magritte).