Isla Vista & UCSB Series
A four part series exploring the UC Santa Barbara & Isla Vista experience, created from the footage I shot back in 2017 when I was a student at the university. The video series is set to one of my favorite albums The (Evening) by an artist I have admired a great deal over the past few years, ford.
This video series attempts to harness, communicate, and petrify what it is that made Isla Vista particularly special, what it is that makes any community full of young people navigating their lives special, and how that all remains—the magic of a little community we once called “home”—continuing to teach us, embolden us, and cultivate parts of who we are now, whenever "now" is.
Watch Part 1 ⇢
96 Years: A Film for My Grandmother
My grandmother, Jeanette Zane, is one of the strongest people I know. For her 96th birthday I edited together a visual memoir dedicated to her life, including an interview I conducted with her back in 2016.
The interview was originally arranged in an attempt to understand how she has maintained such a large capacity for joy and compassion, while having endured several life hardships (family loss, personal conflict, racial discrimination). I wanted to understand how she faired emotionally through losing her son (my uncle) at a young age, losing my grandfather, and growing up as a Chinese-American in a time when Asian-Americans experienced daily prejudice around the United States.
Throughout the interview, however, she mainly spoke about her life in Hawaii (where she was born and lived for the first quarter of her life), the memories she felt fond of, and various stories about the people she knew. After a while, I realized that it may not be my place to ask her to revisit difficult times, or perhaps her answer was right there, threaded between what was said and what was not. Perhaps the most important thing we can do in life is celebrate what is in front of us, what might be, and what has been. Every time I end a phone call with my grandmother, she tells me to enjoy myself, often reinstating the words "life is too short to worry, have fun," or “do as much as you can, time is fleeting.”
Included in the video: Footage taken between 2016 - 2019, on visits to her home in California (2016); A family trip to Kauai, Hawaii (2016), to see where she spent her childhood; A family trip to New England (2018), to visit one of her “bucket list” destinations, Martha’s Vineyard; A family trip to Oahu, Hawaii (2019), to visit the people she has known all her life, friends from her childhood, college years, and beyond, for what was likely her last trip to the islands.
Watch the Short ⇢
Shorts on Uncertainty: “Joy” + “Floating”
After graduating college, I moved from California to New York City in aims of building a career in writing, film, and photography. I found myself suspended (or rather, thrown between the highs and lows) of uncertainty and excitement. For most people my age, our first year “on our own” as independents in the “real world” amounted to a year full of opportunities, misfortunes, and most of all growth.
I created two videos within that first year, attempting to highlight the joy, hope, and optimism I tried to hold onto and harness as strongly as I could, amidst episodes of doubt, dread, and depression. I wanted to capture the multifaceted nature of joy, how our experiences are dictated by us, our attitudes, and our interactions with others. I wanted to harness the truth that life can be confusing, while ultimately celebrating the things that clarify our confusion.
The entire human journey is bound to bring a mirage of sorrow, questions, and contemplations that keep us up at night, but alongside those mirages are innumerable miracles that bring us back up: people, places, and moments that give us a reason to smile. These miracles are created by us: friends, family, strangers, people we know and people we have yet to meet.