I was honored to be included on the first edition of The Next Top Model.
I remember my first time shooting a video for the show. I was 17 and I was a freshman at the local film school. I had been to a couple of the seminars, so I knew I could make it as a camera operator. But when the day came to record my first video, I was terrified… of shooting myself.
One of the first things my editor, Alex, and I talked about during production was how to make sure people would look forward to seeing the video. We tried a lot of different things to make it more exciting. We used slow motion, which only made the feeling worse, and we changed it from a slow-motion video to a slow-motion video with a panning camera. We even added the sound of someone breathing behind the camera, which made the video feel very claustrophobic.
The thing that really struck me on that first shoot was how much our camera was shaking. I had a lot of fears that we wouldn’t be able to get the footage we wanted. I have a lot of experience shooting video, but the process of taking so many shots to make an hour-long video took a lot out of each of us. The first thing I did when I finished the video was put a plastic bag over my head.
I’ve noticed that the camera is usually shaking a lot less than it does in the video. The reason is that the camera is always on hand, and the camera shake is usually the result of the camera’s movement being so large that it creates a lot of reflections. This is why I put the bag over my head, because I don’t want a reflection of my own.
It’s kind of like when you take a picture with your phone that you don’t really care about, but you get a photo that you do want to keep, and you’re not sure how to get the photo you want without the shake. But if you’re shooting a video with a phone, you don’t want the shake, and you don’t want to get a reflection of yourself in the shot you’re taking.
What’s really cool about Deathloop is that you aren’t actually in a time loop. You go through the same areas over and over again, but the only way to get to them is to use the map that the game gives you. Every Deathloop map is unique, and there’s no way to get to every map.
So for example, the island that you are on is called Blackreef, so you can get there one time, and then you can get to the island where you meet the Visionaries. But even though there is a map, it doesnt show you where youre going. There are shortcuts, like going right by a lake and crossing a bridge, but then going all the way around a huge lake and then going all the way back. Thats actually pretty cool.
The final scene of the game is pretty fucking surreal. The game takes you back to the beginning of the game and then it turns into a giant battle system between the Visionaries and their enemies for their ultimate goal: to kill up to eight Visionaries each. I remember watching the game in the late 90s when I was a kid and the first mission in the game would have been to kill up to eight Visionaries.
The game is a bit of a cult-classic because it’s so well-written and well-made. But of course, there are also many good games that don’t make a great deal of sense and are just really bad. I’d love to see a game that’s just like that. That would be a game I could watch and then read about and think, “I would love to play this game. I think it would be pretty cool.