Intern profile: Grace Lillash debuts her first music video

On any given day you'll find a filmmaker at work in the Wex Film/Video Studio, whether it's one of our full-time editors, a visiting filmmaker at the facility for a Film/Video Studio residency, or an intern supporting our full-time staff. In the last category is Grace Lillash, a Columbus Alternative High School student and recent Film/Video Studio intern whose work was introduced to Wex audiences in 2016, when her short film Walking the Cow was selected for the annual Ohio Shorts program. And earlier this year, her stop-motion call for entries for Ohio Shorts 2018 ran before feature presentations in the Film/Video Theater.

This summer, Grace made the transition to residency filmmaker at the Wex with a music video project for the local band Stems and their new song, "Fast."

"I was already friends with them and we’d always shoot together so we just thought, why not do a video?" Grace recalled. "I thought it’d be cool for both of us and they’d never done a video before."

It was shot in a frequent location for Grace: her parents's spacious garage. "We wanted to keep it simple," she said. "I didn’t want to do too much of a story because I’m definitely more of a visual person. I wanted to do more with colors—what I see when I hear the song."

Instead of capturing footage digitally, she shot on Hi8 videotape for its lo-fi look, using an old family camera. Post-production support from the Film/Video Studio allowed Grace to use her format of choice without worrying about the additional equipment or cost involved in converting video to digital files. 

For the content, filmmaker and band agreed on a playful vibe, with Grace choosing backdrops and props to make the color scheme pop and overlaying the moving images with frames that are heavy on painterly texture. "I love colors in my art," she said.

The final result is really fun. 

Thanks to Grace and to Kendall, Dante, Zack, and Mickey from Stems for sharing.