In this slice-of-life documentary, filmmaker Nick Criscitello captures college dropout Dan Hoover reflecting on his time at school and his relationship with art.
My favorite film of the weekend, a part of the ‘Rising Stars’ segment at the Blackbird Film Festival, filmmaker Nick Criscitello delivered a hard-hitting mockumentary that perfectly portrayed the struggles of young students who have lost their sense of direction.
Growing up Dan fell in love with the aspect of creativity within art. The free-flowing ideas, the adaptation from one idea to the next, and the ability to make something out of nothing. But at school, classes and project deadlines put a halt to that sense of ultimate creativity for Dan.
This film does a wonderful job of capturing the harsh reality of growing up. Just seconds into watching it and hearing the first few things Dan has to say, almost every student at SUNY Broome, or any college really, could relate to Dan. You can easily understand his frustration with the world and how he’s feeling.
When asked about his vision behind the film, Nick said “It started with the thought of graduating and how scared I was of leaving my comfort zone, going into adulthood, as well as my problems with school, mainly college.”
“I regretted going to school for film the more I went along. I felt like the idea of “creativity on demand” was tiring. My films became homework and I struggled to keep up, which took the fun out of it. Essentially, the film was made for me to voice my frustrations.”
Nick uses multiple different video editing techniques that make this film next level. The way he makes the present day bright and color saturated and the past dark and monotonous goes a long way to emphasize the time change.
When I first saw this I was completely dumbfounded as to how Nick pulled this off. I thought there is no way he planned this film out over years waiting for Dan to get older.
“When my professor said I could start writing a film, I just went to my notebook with all my ideas and found one that was sorta ‘don’t forget me.’ I literally got on Discord that same night, and Dan has his face cam on because he wanted to show everyone how homeless he looked since he hadn’t cut his hair for so long. I texted him after and was like DO NOT CUT YOUR HAIR! I have a film idea! So when it was time to shoot, we shot the homeless scenes first, I went back up to school and then came back the next weekend when he cut his hair and had a clean shave. It was like about a week and a half of filming.”
In under two weeks, driving back and forth on the weekends between Buffalo and Binghamton, Nick managed to put together an eleven minute film that looks like it took years to make.
Moving forward, Nick plans on letting nothing stop him from doing what he loves to do. “I will make films forever, even if I don’t have the funding.”