Brandon Laine

Certain things in my life have simply resonated with me. I can’t easily explain why, but ever since I was a child many of those things had to do with collections. It seemed that having physical embodiments of my experiences gave me a way to hold onto the past, and give me an escape from the present day.

I never turned to art in my younger years, I just wasn’t as interested in reading. My art stopped after animated movies and TV shows, simply because they gave me more nostalgia as I watched them over and over again. My habit of “pleasure reading” finally began around the start of high school, once I discovered that many of my developing thoughts and questions about life could easily be answered with the right book.

I have always liked authors who found a way to view the world in a new light. Mark Twain was at the top of that list for me. After collecting baseball cards as a child, I found that collecting philosophical ideas (through authors like him) in high school was the most satisfying. These new viewpoints on living became the next valuable commodity in my life, and I wanted to collect as many as I could.

Until I found filmmaking as a possible career choice, nothing seemed to interest me for my future. I first discovered video-editing in my high school marketing class, where we were assigned to create commercials that advertised products in the school store. I soon found the possibilities of video to be entrancing, before going on to make many of my own video projects with my friends. I received my first Super 8mm Camera soon after I switched my college major to film (from engineering physics) in 2011. The look and feel of “old cinema” was what interested me the most, and I wanted to make more pieces that gave me that same feeling when I watched them.

My first semi-professional films in college had a very specific motivation behind them, to provide that same nostalgic feeling to other people that I cared about. I would only ever cast my friends, and do my best to capture the group together in a really memorable setting. I felt that this would be something fun for them to look back upon in the future. Then they could have a concrete thing to always have in their own collections.

Along with film, I have been so fortunate to stumble upon another passion in college, swing dancing. I was never a dancer before college, and would have laughed at anyone who told me that I would be. But this activity embodies so