Wasteland (compilation) (2019, 80min)

Wasteland is a feature film (~80 minutes) made up of 5 shorter films; The Earth is Flat (6 min), Goodbye Forever Party (20 min), Dr. Sam Mulaney's Burden (4 min), We Are All Dying in the Wasteland (4 min), and The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (45 min). You can get them individually, or get this to get all of them.

Each of these films builds on top of themes established by the last, and while they can all be viewed separately, when viewed all together they become a cohesive piece that discusses the subjectivity of reality, worldviews defined by emotion rather than logic, mental illness, and living life in the midst of pain.

The films were made from 2015-2019, and were my student films while attending CalArts for Experimental Animation. I went into school with the idea that I wanted all of my films to be connected- but I didn’t know how it would manifest until I completed Earth is Flat and started Goodbye Forever Party. The idea came out of being interested in the emotional subjectivity of reality, as well as my interest in trying different visual styles to communicate mood. When I started Goodbye Forever Party, I decided to keep the landmarks of the Wasteland in the background, and try to subtly communicate that it was in the same world. You can see the idea come to fruition in the last 3 shorts, where I decided to push the concept further than I had been planning. “Ascensia” serves as the concluding point of the themes I established in the earlier films.

EIF, GFP and DOA were my major films from this time, but Dr. Sam Mulaney’s Burden + Dying in the Wasteland were projects I completed for smaller classes. I used the classes’ creative project requirement to make films to flesh out the concept of Wasteland more, instead of making unrelated pieces. I included them in the series despite their lower quality (EIF and GFP each took 1 year to complete, DOA took 2 years, Burden/Dying were both completed in 2 weeks each to fulfill my class requirements), because I felt that they helped contextualize everything more.

Earth is Flat was completed when I was 18, Goodbye Forever Party when I was 19, Dr. Sam Mulaney’s Burden/We Are All Dying in the Wasteland when I was 20, and the Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia was completed when I was 21. As a result these films feel like watching my worldview gradually shift in real time as I made the transition to adulthood.