"The Blue Period" is a ongoing cinematic project inspired by the aesthetic and emotional depth of Picasso's Blue Period. The project is composed of a series of short mini-films, each lasting between 1 and 4 minutes. Each film is captured in a single, static, unbroken shot, designed to evoke the qualities of a painting: dense with story and emotion, where only a fraction of the narrative is visible, hinting at a much larger world beneath the surface. The films are created and released in volumes of 10, each set featuring its own cast and exploring a shared macro-arc that connects the individual pieces. The volume is designed to be exhibited in both a chronological form (a 10-chapter short film) and as an art installation, with the pieces projected in parallel into a gallery space, combined and assembled to create an emersive in-person experience. Volume 1 premiered in Los Angeles in July 2023; Volume 2 - a much larger undertaking in both budget and scope - is in final stages of post-production with a premiere anticipated in Spring of 2025.

Over a century after Picasso grappled with the suicide of a close friend, I found myself navigating a similar terrain of collective grief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Struggling with anxiety, creative stagnation, and unprocessed trauma, I an encountered an unexpected muse in Picasso's "Portrait of Sebastià Junyer Vidal," hanging at the LACMA near my former L.A. residence. The painting combined several disparate qualities that left me feeling both unsettled and profoundly curious. Its blue tones hinted at deep sadness, yet the relationship between the figures felt ambiguous, tinged with danger and an inexplicable irony. The people depicted were both familiar and oddly alien, their strangeness amplified by colors that seemed at odds with the weight of the scene. I felt toyed with, provoked, and mocked in ways that were confounding and inspiring.

I was thus introduced to the body of Picasso's work called The Blue Period, a small but profoundly meaningful collection of work that combines a deep understanding of sorrow and grief with a playful focus on the physicalities of emoting people. I learned that a 20-year-old Picasso began this period of his career on the heels of his close friend's death by suicide. This work was catharsis through beauty, exactly the thing I was seeking in my own life. I set about an experiment to express a similar set of sentiments and aesthetics through film, and my Blue Period was born.

Collaborating with actors deeply connected to their emotional selves, I have sought to create characters that play upon the idiosyncracies of both the actors themselves and characters in Picasso's paintings. In an effort to approximate the restrictive-but-expansive experience of viewing a painting, I have challenged myself to find depth in the simplicity of single-shot, short form film pieces without camera movement, treating the screen as a canvas rather than a roving eye. I have also sought to curate an experience for actors that resembles the close collaboration of theater, including a focus on connecting and bonding over the material, working closely together to craft characters and explore back stories, and seeking feedback about the process during and after completion of each volume.

My aspiration with this series is to create something that can be experienced by an in-person audience that goes beyond the typical movie-going ritual and invites viewers to engage physically with the work in the way we do with paintings.