Artist Statement

Hi my name is Dylan Owen and I was born in Seattle in 1998. I moved to Westchester and attended Irvington High School before I inevitably graduated and came here to Hunter College. I visit England every summer to see my grandparents and cousins.

My first years working with film were maybe best summed up with the word desperate. Nobody in my town asked anybody to jump on board and help them with projects so whatever experience I acquired was of my own accord. If I was looking to make something it was only gonna happen if I tackled it all myself, no one was just gonna hand me credit on a project. The year after I graduated my school raised a multi million dollar bond to build a new track/field and my friend and I were asked to record the whole construction process in a time-lapse manner in order to get the community excited about the new amenities coming to the school. This was my first time being approached for anything remotely psuedo-professional. We were given money for a GoPro and its scheduler and time to fly my drone every weekend that summer. The GoPro was left ontop of a building set to take a picture every 10 minutes of the construction, we left the GoPro there until we finished recording and took it down, turned out the battery was fine but it just decided to stop taking photos after 2 days, RIP months of waiting. In a positive contrast to the bad news the drone footage was gorgeous and we managed to edit it so that the track was being built week by week all in front of one edited continous shot that was seamless in transition. Most of my projects are shorts and I have never made anything over 10 minutes. I like reading books and imagining what the film for the book would look like as I read it. Directors that have influenced me are Edgar Wright, Wes Anderson and the all too often answer, Tarantino. I’m a sucker for the film The Grand Budapest Hotel. I am looking forward to becoming more comfortable with Adobe Premiere Pro after spending 2 years with the old final cut. Between my retirement from Final Cut and now I unfortunately have only worked with casual free apps like Imovie after losing my access to the expensive software. But nevertheless I still used Imovie to edit a drone video I made for the Manresa Association, I was told that there was an abandoned coal factory that had left its industrial remnants in the State protected wetlands around its premise. I was asked to make a drone video of the whole scene in order to help people that live in the area will be better able to realize the threat that is in their community.