Bus Ride on Death Road

Artist’s Statement

Bus Ride on Death Road (6:25) is a short film I created by splicing several clips from educational 1950s PSA films in the Prelinger Archives together. It’s my first long-form narrative project using this video collage technique, and focuses on the transformation of the source material’s emotional context from informative and all American to a noire mystery set almost entirely on a bus crossing America.

In making Bus Ride on Death Road I wanted to subvert the viewer’s expectations of the source material by giving the piece a darker feel through making the celebrity football star the villain of the piece. The Prelinger collage series is my way of exploring my own heritage of growing up in small-town America – the changes that are made within my collages are similar to the changes that come when looking at something through personal memory. Things that were straightforward become less so, families that seemed perfect have many more imperfections than we might have thought at the time, from the outside.