Tessa Hickman
Road 96 - Stories From Here
Prompt: For this project, we rewrote a myth native to our hometown and researched a site that would be featured in the final text. Part of our research for the site was to recreate an object and make a video of the site that features the recreated object. The video was made to showcase elements of the site such as visuals, sounds, atmosphere, and overall feeling the site exudes. In short, a video poem to the land.
For the video of my site, I wanted to play with two versions of the location; the day and the night. I chose to document road 96 on the outskirts of my hometown Davis CA. A place I would frequent with my friends when we had nowhere else to be or when we were seeking solitude. Mostly at night blasting music, we would spend hours on this road, occasionally only leaving when the farmers who tend the fields next to the road started their morning rounds. The idea of the farmers knowing the fields as a place of work that is sunny, hot, and tiring, and me and my friends knowing the fields as a haven, dark and free to come and go as you please. In my story, this site is a grave for the main character, it’s scary and unpleasant, but by the end, the site is transformed into a lush mountain, full of beauty one wouldn’t be able to imagine it was once a site of a tragic accident.
To show these two versions, I filmed several nature shots in the afternoon light and at sunset. I then filmed my car in the night, music playing loudly and without much nature in the shots. I edited these clips to go back and forth to show the two versions while making it known that they are, in fact, the same place, as seen by the daylit road flashing to the car at night, the camera hasn’t moved, but the scene has changed.