Avery Winwood has liked telling stories her whole life, mostly through theater, which she has been involved with since she was just 8 years old.
But then Winwood, a 2021 The Dalles High School graduate, took a video production class last fall, and discovered she liked this new way of telling stories.
Avery Winwood
In fact, she used one of her videos in her successful application to famed film school Ithaca College in New York, where she’s headed in the fall. Her first semester as a freshman, she’ll be able to use the film equipment there, something other programs don’t allow until junior year.
She describes her attraction to telling stories: “I think it’s a very human thing to want to tell stories and create things. And at least for me, creating stories is a way to express myself and my emotions, and I used acting as the way to explore emotions that I maybe hadn’t felt before.
“Film is just something I want to explore and learn more about and hopefully by the time I graduate from college I’ll have the skills to make stories and share them with the world.”
She said, “I think cinematography is really interesting and if I’m watching a movie, I’m really analyzing the cinematography in the film. I make little short videos all the time. I’ll get inspired by like maybe a song. And I just like to make little short things like in a day or two.”
She just uses her iPhone 8 for her creations. “Nothing fancy,” she said. She did buy a film editing app though. The short film she sent to Ithaca was a black and white silent film titled “Insani-Tea.” It took the concept that insanity is doing the same thing every day and expecting a different outcome.
She was also in the film. It was about the daily routine of someone who gets up at the same time, goes downstairs, boils water for tea. “The hidden thing that is kind of hard to tell in the video, there’s a shot of the person drinking the tea, and there’s a pill in there too.”
The film ends with the person spilling their tea all over the table.
He friends regularly end up in her short films. “My camera roll is filled with just little clips of things we do, like if we go out on little adventures.” She enjoys creating those memories.
It can take a surprisingly long amount of time to do a one-minute video. “One time I made a video and it took nine hours to edit. It was insane, I kind of wanted to cry afterwards. I got inspired and I just didn’t feel like I could do anything else until I got this video made, so that was funny.”
Most of the time it takes her 2-3 hours to do a one-minute video.
She likes cinematography, which includes factors such as how to lay out a shot, what angle it’s coming from, how the camera moves, and how close the subject is to the camera.
Her career aspirations right now are leaning toward music videos. “I often get inspired by music.”
But she can’t use other people’s music because it’s copyrighted. So she’s turned to a YouTube channel that’s full of non-copyrighted music. It often doesn’t have lyrics, she said, “But it works.”
Usually what sparks her creativity is hearing the rhythm of the beat in a song, “because I can imagine how a transition would look between shots. That’s one of the big things for me, I get excited by transitions between scenes.” Especially if that transition happens “exactly on the beat drop.” Her ultimate dream would be to make a movie. She writes sometimes, “so maybe I could write my own.”
She started a screenplay “but it didn’t get very far.” Her tastes run toward drama. “I don’t feel I’m very good at comedy.”
For a long time, Winwood, who has taken a variety of Advanced Placement, college-level courses in high school, didn’t know what she wanted to study in college. Her favorite subject was history. “I love learning about the past.”
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made school harder. “I didn’t think it would be that bad, but winter came and I just felt really stuck. I didn’t feel motivated at all. And the added stress of having to complete college and scholarship applications.”
Thinking about college made her nervous, and for a long time, she thought she’d major in theater. But at the last minute, it wasn’t what appealed to her the most.
It was making videos, and she found that she’s able to get the vision she has in her mind successfully transferred to a video.
She’s able to get what she envisions into the video.
“I usually do quite a bit of planning. It usually takes me a little bit of time. I like to write things down and draw things out, visualize them a bit before charging headfirst into it.”
As for her short videos, when she sees the finished product “I usually feel very proud just because a lot of the time there’s a lot of hours of work that have gone into making one.”
And the one that took nine hours? “I probably watched it 20 times after I made it. I was like, ‘I did that.’”
Commented