Bolin Katie Chen
Regret
Prompt: In Bridge 2, you will use stories, interview questions and experiences shared with your partner to create an experimental 5 minute (max), edited video that uses a surrealist impulse to fabulate, dream and imagine. Referencing the material you have gathered from your partner as primary research, your videos will invite visual play into moments that may surpass memory, exist outside of what is archivable or require an unexpected sequencing. In seminar, students will create the “gift” as a written artifact. In studio, students will create a “gift” as an experimental moving image. Students are encouraged to think about multiple forms and techniques of video storytelling including video essays, video montage, video portraits, stop motion or a series of social media posts. This bridge will give you the opportunity to gather information from a primary source and respond to it with moving image. In class we will look at a wide range of video making and installation styles by artists working in non-commercial, time-based mediums including: arthouse films, video art, experimental shorts and video installations. Therefore, for this assignment you can consider surrealism as a conceptual framework and video as the medium of method of creation.
This film began with a joke. My partner, Jack, said his biggest regret was not attending the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest. The answer was meant to be funny, but it revealed something more serious beneath it. Jack is constantly compared to Timothee Chalamet, and that comparison has become part of how others see him. Over time, it starts to erase the rest of who he is.
The film explores the pressure of being reduced to a “lookalike” and the quiet mental toll that comes with it. Celebrity culture and social media flatten identity. Individuality gets replaced by resemblance. Someone with their own personality, history, and achievements becomes a reference point instead of a person.
I approached the film with humor to keep it watchable and light on the surface, while allowing discomfort to build underneath. The story is told through a screen recording format, mimicking the way obsession and comparison live online. The film stays in Jack’s first-person point of view as he fixates on the winner of the lookalike contest. He watches the winner’s life improve while his own stays unchanged. Regret, jealousy, and fantasy begin to blur.
The humor makes the film accessible, but the focus is on identity loss and quiet unraveling. What starts as a joke becomes a portrait of how easily someone can disappear inside a comparison they never asked for.