Going the Distance

 

Created and Written by: Zack Welsh

Click here to see the full video on Vimeo!

 

When I decided I was going to FSU, I knew I wanted to study abroad at some point. By the time fall of 2013 rolled around, I also knew I needed to get some professional experience under my belt before graduation. After some great talks with IP, I realized that interning abroad over the summer would be the perfect blend of those two aspirations.

With an experience like studying abroad, you feel an overwhelming urge to capture everything around you and save it somehow. Most people quickly realize it’ll be a long time before they’ll have a shot to come back and they want to have something to remember their time by. For most of my peers, that urge manifested itself in a journal, scrapbook, or a blog. I made a sincere effort to journal and blog but I found myself constantly frustrated trying to find the right words and doubly frustrated when I realized I could be out there doing things rather than scribbling in my book for an hour. For me, a video was just natural. My camera was always on me and all it required was pointing, shooting, and worrying about the finished product later. I could capture what I was seeing without worrying about finding the right words.

Over the summer I had an idea of what I wanted to do and the running idea was a branch of that original idea. I can’t claim total creative credit for the movie I made since I was heavily inspired by this video Casey Neistat made for Nike a few years ago. He uses the running-through-the-frame shot quite a bit. However that video, and the message behind it, heavily fueled my ambitions for travel that summer. I wanted to see, do, and experience as much as possible and I thought the image of me running through those locations captured that ambition.

In total, I took over 50 of those running videos in eight different countries and 25 different cities. I think I used around thirty in the final cut. The shots were not always easy to get and I CANNOT thank my friends who helped hold the camera enough. The only reason I don’t have credits for them rolling at the end is because it would have been longer than the video itself. At any rate, I owe them all big time. 

There were plenty of tough situations where filming wasn’t exactly encouraged (Parliament), crowds made running nearly impossible (Times Square), and the weather didn’t cooperate (Paris). In one instance, I was running along a beach in Barcelona only to be reminded later while editing that it was a topless beach. I had to cut that one out to avoid the R rating. Occasionally, people would ask what I was doing and after I told them my idea, it was a toss up between them giving me encouragement or them rolling their eyes at me.

I learned a lot this summer but my main takeaway came from an Irish bartender from Boston I ran across in London during the first week. At the end of our conversation, he nonchalantly tossed out ‘the more things change, the more they’re the same.’ (I’m pretty sure it’s a French proverb but who cares. I’m giving this guy credit.) Originally, I took it as a pessimistic statement that belittled the value of traveling and reduced the value of experiencing new things. However, at the end of the summer, those words took on a new flavor to me. It instead meant that no matter how far you travel on this planet, you’ll always have something or someone you can identify with in that place. I tried to weave that into the video a little bit by making sure the clips were from as diverse locations as possible and it’s why I included NYC at the end.

Feel free to watch the video here and I hope it motivates you to travel with FSU IP. The song is ‘Get Found’ by Bass Drum of Death and I shot everything on a Canon S110 and edited in iMovie.

Thanks for reading! Go Noles!