Digital Video Projects
by Philip Guo (philip@pgbovine.net)
Karate Fight with Myself
June 2003 - One day while sitting at home I had the sudden idea to try to make a short video where I fought myself in my backyard. I was inspired by the special effects I had just seen in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo fights hundreds of Agent Smiths. During filming, I looked like an idiot flailing around in my backyard fighting an imaginary person, but then I fired up Adobe Premier and managed to edit the video so that it looked kind of like I was fighting myself. It was a fairly hacked-up, unprofessional job, but then again, I'm no video special effects artist.
MacGregor House Video 2003
March 2003 - During my sophomore year, I created this video to advertise MacGregor House, my undergraduate dormitory at MIT, to incoming freshmen. Each year, all incoming MIT freshman receive a CD (called the i3 CD) with descriptions, photos, and videos of all the undergraduate dormitories in order to help them make a choice about which one to pick to live in. I volunteered to make the video for MacGregor House, the dorm which I have lived in for my entire 4-year undergraduate career. This video took quite a bit of planning in terms of the organization, filming, interviews, and editing. I shot footage throughout Feb. and March and edited during Spring Break. I was very happy that this video was a huge success because many underclassmen still remember seeing this video and tell me that it was one of the primary reasons that they picked MacGregor House as their dorm of choice :)
MacGregor House Video 2005
March 2005 - Fast-forward two years later to my senior year. Nobody made a video for MacGregor during 2004 so we just re-used my 2003 video, but this year some people decided to make a new one. I wasn't initially involved in this project, but I was called in at the last minute to help my friend Seve put something together. We hacked this together in one exhausting 14-hour work-fest, so it was much more raw and unplanned than the video I made in 2003.
Indoor Snowball Fight Silent Movie
February 2003 - In this video, I tried to mimic a silent movie style with the use of black and white, melodramatic classical music, and bold text for narration. Here is the story: During a particularly snowy day, my friends and I decided to go outside to have a snowball fight ... but then we decided that a better idea was to bring the snow inside in a cooler and have a snowball fight INDOORS. We decided to ambush a friend who was sleeping at the time by luring him into the lounge and pelting him with snowballs. Then just as he thought that the attack was over, another guy was going to come in and smash a GIANT snowball over his head. However, the sleeping friend got pissed when we lured him into the lounge and walked away, but there was a chest full of snowballs and the guy with the GIANT snowball didn't know about the failure of our initial ambush. Wait till you see what happens next!
