
My current ongoing film project recreates New York in the late 70s. I lived there then, one of the city's most gritty eras—think Midnight Cowboy. This archival photo you see above captures that world. It's become a cornerstone of my opening sequence, where I superimpose "1977, New York" to ground the viewer in time and place.
The film's visual language lives primarily in a grainy, black-and-white tones. Any contemporary footage I incorporate gets desaturated and slowed down to match the texture of 70s archival video. Modern film, shot at higher speeds and resolution, needs this technical manipulation to feel authentic. I also use AI to generate motion within archival photos, as when I generated moving fire in the garbage can in the image above.
But within this grainy landscape, I create moments of contrast using high-resolution imagery—like the combination of two stock footage stills you see here.

I'm experimenting with an overlay technique, where I reduce the transparency of one image and layer it over another. In this film sequence, the base layer shows birds soaring through New York skyscrapers. Over this, I've placed video of young people dancing on the beach, but in the sequence you only see their heads bouncing in slow motion. It captures the lyrical dance feeling I want, mainly through the movement of hair, all of it backlit by the sun.
To build my narrative, Coney Island Sunrise, I’ve combined archival, AI-generated, and documentary footage into a story about young NY street hustlers transforming hardship into an unlikely grace, and well, it seemed impossible at first. But now, weeks later, I'm actually close to done.

Comments