Experimental Narrative Film • 52 mins. (2024)

Credits: Written, Directed, & Edited by Corey Hughes. Produced by Daniel April & Jonna McKone. Starring Hanna Olivegren. Cinematography by Tyler Davis. Production Design by Becca Morrin. Sound Design & Mix by Jared Paolini. Supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, Berlinale Talents, and MacDowell. 

Featuring music by Amy Reid, AV Moves, Dj Shshunj, Hélène Vogelsinger, Sarah Davachi, Andrew Bernstein, SAZA, Reece Cox, & Hanna Olivegren

Synopsis: Isolated in her warehouse apartment, Jodiiie plays a VR guided meditation video game to calm her escalating anxiety. The game, run by a next-generation AI algorithm, adapts its gameplay to the player’s emotions as they navigate twelve levels on a quest to achieve the ultimate goal: transcendence. Jodiiie becomes increasingly consumed by the game as the meditation descends into a maze of real, virtual, and hybrid worlds. Ultimately, Jodiiie must transcend the game itself.

Project Info: “Your Final Meditation” is an experimental narrative exploring the body’s relationship to camera technologies, spirituality, and emerging virtual worlds. Using a collaged approach of techniques, it combines scripted scenes, wildlife documentation, improvised performance, AI-generated content, screen-captured video games, and 3D animation to depict a world constantly mediated by technologies we don’t fully understand, or control.

Our main filming location was "The Floristree," in the now closed H&H Building located in the Bromo Arts District. An integral part of the Baltimore DIY scene of 2010’s and one of the last true artist run spaces in the city. In 2022, the building was sold and the tenants evicted so the building could be converted to high end lofts. Using furniture, objects, and plants we constructed Jodiiie’s fictional bedroom. Weaving the history and present reality of the Baltimore art scene into the film we sought to pay homage to the past and document both the physical space and it's spirit once more before it disappeared. 

Personal Statement: “Your Final Meditation” is my longest work to date as a Director. The culmination of topics, techniques, and ideas developed in my previous short films and work as a cinematographer. I see it as an extended short film. Like a hike in the woods or a drug trip, it starts as one thing and expands into another.

In 2019, I began having intense anxiety and panic attacks. I wasn’t able to make films anymore. Or leave my house. The following year, in quarantine, I felt my world further collapsing around me. Like many others, isolated in my apartment, I turned to meditation to reduce my anxiety and find space internally. Using meditation to access and explore internal worlds gave me insight into how we view and shape our external environments. 

This film began as an attempt to replicate the feeling of navigating my inner landscape. Moving between intense panic and blissful serenity. Using a process-driven approach, the narrative emerged as new pieces were written, filmed, and assembled. I found that through this new filmmaking process I could observe, transform, and transcend my anxiety. Filmed in sections over three years, in-and-out of quarantine, the project is the result of collaborations with a wide range of artists, filmmakers, and musicians.

Screenings: Rockaway Film Fest, New/Next, FWB Fest, Now Instant Image Hall, Flat Earth Film Fest, 30______70 DOC FEST, Roxy Cinema, Ithaca Experimental Film Fest

Press: "...Your Final Meditation’s digitally generated imagery uses 360 cameras to create a hybrid reality-meets-video-games aesthetic as disorienting and alienating as it is purely mesmerizing. While Jodiiie slips deeper and deeper into the internal world of VR, her physical reality is at risk: the building she lives in has been sold. Filmed in the warehouse space Floristree in the H&H Arts Building in downtown Baltimore in the final weeks before new owners took over from displaced tenants, Your Final Meditation is also a document of a quickly disappearing DIY Baltimore..." -Alex Lei "Filmmaker Magazine"

"Anxiety is famously hard to depict on screen, but Hughes’ blend of reality and imaginary manages, to use his language, to transcend that difficulty...to navigate the story in much the same way Jodiiie navigates her anxiety. It’s a puzzle that doesn’t offer easy answers, reflecting the way anxiety can feel both all-encompassing and hard to articulate. For those willing to engage with the film’s complexities, it offers a strikingly raw portrayal of the human mind’s struggles to find peace in the digital age."  - Emily DuGranrut "In Review"

Experimental Short Film • 8 min. (2018)

Credits: Written, Directed, & Edited by Corey Hughes. Starring  Malek Robbana. Filmed by Danielle Criqui, Corey Hughes, Tyler Davis, Aidan Spann, George Cessna, Fiona Sergeant, Cooper Wright, & Christian Hughes. Original Score by AV Moves.

Synopsis: A YouTube Yoga tutorial.  A collapsed body. An expanded view. "My Expanded View" uses the format of a YouTube yoga tutorial and its collapse as a basis for exploration of  new age spirituality, domestic surveillance, and camera technologies. How do we document the body and who is doing the documenting? 

Project Info: Working with local yoga instructor Malek Robbana and a team of Baltimore filmmakers the footage was captured in one continuous take. Each participant was given a set of rules within which to work. The film developed out of the performance of both cast and crew. The project was created during a period when I was working as a camera operator on reality TV shows. I found that when working on those sets I was way more interested in the dynamics going on behind the camera than by what was being filmed. I wanted to create a film that showed the collapse of the film set structure and blurred the line between who is filming and who is being filmed.

Commissioned by Adult Swim for an episode of "Off the Air" curated by Baltimore based performance group Wham City Comedy. My Expanded View premiered at the 2018 Maryland Film Festival alongside a public group meditation event organized by artists involved the film. The event featured a meditation on the history of technology, an installation of paintings on fabric, a cocktail bar, and live performances by two Baltimore based experimental musicians, John Jones & Aimee Lin. It had its International Premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2018. 

Official Selection: Locarno Film Festival, Slamdance, Maryland Film Festival, Valdivia Film Festival, Pančevo Film Festival, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Janela Festival de Recife, Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Message to Man (Silico Competition), Now Instant Image Hall, Nitehawk  

Awards: Vimeo Staff Pick 2019

"[My Expanded View] should be labelled as a tutorial on shooting in the age of digital cinema. Hughes delivers a masterclass on using tools such as drones, iPads, Osmo cameras, thermal cameras, and what-not, to expand our views on how images can be created today."
- Locarno Film Festival

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Hybrid Documentary Short Film • 5 min. (2017)

Credits: Written, Directed, Filmed, & Edited by Corey Hughes. Starring José Antoine Cernuda. Produced by Liliana Díaz Castillo, Estephania Bonnett Alonso, Lucía Dapena.  

Synopsis: The internet in Cuba is very slow. Movies, television, and information are exchanged through a black market system of media distribution via external hard drives known as “el paquete semanal.” Shot over the course of a day in the town of San Antonio de los Baños, the film combines narrative, documentary, and experimental elements to create, like the paquete itself, new images and new connections between distant and unseen forces. A meditation on the flow of data and the search for human connection in a groundless world.
 
Project Info: Armageddon 2 is an experimental narrative short film produced during Black Factory Cinema's Filmmaking in Cuba workshop taught by Werner Herzog in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. The film was selected by Herzog as one of the top ten films from the workshop and received international festival distribution through Black Factory Cinema. The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival where it was awarded the Pardi di Domani Special Jury Mention Award. The film was included in the short film compilation Eyeslicer Season 2 and released online via NoBudge. It was released physically in a limited edition of physical USB Hats designed in collaboration with visual artist Michelle Uckotter. 

This project is a good example of my cinematography and directing style. Working with non-actors, creating fictional narratives based on documentary subjects, creating images that look and feel “digital,” and using humor, beauty, and surrealism as a gateway to explore deeper issues of spirituality, identity, technology, and surveillance.

Official Selection: Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Orleans Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Valdivia Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Uppsala Film Festival, Short Waves Film Festival, Janela Festival de Cine Recife, FIDOCS, Tenerife Shorts, Pančevo Film Festival, DOC Buenos Aires, Transcinema Peru, Oaxaca Film Festival, Message to Man - Silico Experimental Competition, Kurzfilmfestival Köln

Awards: Locarno Film Festival Pardi di Domani Special Jury Mention Award

"Hughes achieves a fragment of today's Cuba from a story with a lot of humor, where its value and originality lies in how this character allows himself to be observed and admired. A USB necklace as a door to happiness. A bunch of bananas as a banner of a transaction. A computer screen where five windows are seen at the same time. A different vision on new brotherhoods fostered by the territory of the virtual."
- Monica Delgado, DesistFilm
 

Hybrid Documentary Feature Film • 72 mins. (2020) 

Credits: Cinematography & co-writing by Corey Hughes. Directed by Marnie Ellen Hertzler. Produced by Memory. Original Score by Animal Collective. 

Synopsis: In a world that undulates between fact and fiction, digital and physical, a group of SoundCloud rappers lives a solitary, post-societal existence in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. Once a religious and spiritual mecca for many, Crestone’s endless sand dunes, waterfalls, and dark caves act as a backdrop for images of tattooed bodies, cosplay wardrobes, and clouds of weed smoke. "Crestone" explores the often hidden aspects of collaboration and friendship as well as the human desire to persist against all odds. What does music sound like if there is no one left to repost and share it?

Official Selection: SXSW, True/False,  Maryland Film Festival, Champs Elysées Film Festival, BoilerRoom 4:3, DocYard, Denver Film Festival, American Film Festival (Poland), Sound Unseen 21, CPH:DOX

Screenings: BAMCinema, Rockaway Film Fest, MUBI, Le Cinema Club, Japanese Screening Tour (Koba, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya)
Distributed by UTOPIA

“REMINISCENT OF HARMONY KORINE’S GUMMO... CAPTURES CRUDE MOMENTS OF AN EXAGGERATED REALITY AND REFLECTS HUMANITY IN THE SOULS OF THE LOST AND BIZARRE.”

- Fiona Murphy, VOX MAGAZINE

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Music Video • 4 min. (2020)

Credits: Directed & Edited by Corey Hughes. Featuring Amy Reid with Background Vocals by Chase O'Hara. Cinematography by Tyler Davis. 

Synopsis: A late night party. Thinking about other things. Brought back to the present moment by the people around you. A celebration of the dancers, performers, artists, and musicians in Baltimore and the collaborative creative energy of the city. Featuring many faces familiar to the Baltimore music scene including Eze Jackson, Abdu Ali, Pangelica, & EN'B. Filmed at the artist run space The Compound. 

"The Corey Hughes-directed visual for “Woke Me” is like a dream state event set in an opulent ballroom of enchantment and wonderment. Captured and curated before the lockdown; the audience is invited to join some of Baltimore’s best and brightest stars that are criminally underrepresented in both — and outside of their home digs. A contemporary viewing of the video feels like entering a vision world of an alternate and inclusive new realities of togetherness and camaraderie"
- Week in Pop

Music Video • 5 min. (2020) 

Credits: Direction, Cinematography, & Edit by Corey Hughes. Choreography by Melissa Ivester. Skaters: Melissa Ivester, Victoria Bush, Vince Shacknies, Isabelle Shacknies, Sylvia Johnson.

Synopsis/Project Info: Documentation of a figure skating routine choreographed to the track "People's Park" by Horse Lords. The camera was operated by an ice skating Corey Hughes. Having the camera on the ice allowed for more dynamic and energetic camera movement, closely following and reacting to the figure skater's movements. Digital zooms and re-positioning were created in post-production to add a digital element that counters the filmic texture of the images. 

Filmed at THE GARDENS ICE HOUSE in Laurel, Maryland. 

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Experimental Short Film • 8 min. (2019)

Credits: Written, Directed, & Edited by Corey Hughes. Starring  Nick Vyssotsky. Filmed by Corey Hughes, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, & Nick Vyssotsky. Music by AV MOVES. 3D Animation by Anna Brancaccio. Toe Shoe Model by Max Anderson. Funding provided by the Maryland State Arts Council.

Synopsis: A Florida man (known only by his YouTube username: DeerPro42) records an unboxing video for Vibram Five Finger Toe Shoes. After a vision from a mysterious CGI camera operator, he travels to the Florida keys by hoverboard. As his unboxing video continues his attention shifts from the product to himself. A crisis on the beach. An eye in the sky. The unboxer unboxed. 

Project Info: "MyToeShoes.Com" is the second film in a series that focuses on popular YouTube genres as creation sites for new types of performative avatars. Filmed with a variety of different cameras (aerial drone, head mounted GoPro's, 360 camera on selfie stick, screen recordings, CGI, cinema camera), the film explores a world in which each person is both watching and being watched, filming and being filmed. The project was filmed by a three person cast/crew over the course of a week travelling from Miami to the Florida Keys in a minivan. 

Official Selection: Maryland Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, Borscht Corp, Slamdance

"In Hughes imagination, the drab format becomes a macrocosmic journey documented with GoPros, 360 degree cameras, Google Maps views and beyond...Hughes has established himself as one of our preeminent experimental filmmakers"
- NoBudge 

Music Video • 4 min. (2016)

Credits: Cinematography& Editing by Corey Hughes. Co-Directed by Abdu Ali & Corey Hughes. Drone Operator: Travis Levasseur.

Project Info: Visuals for "Did Dat," a track off of Baltimore-based performer Abdu Ali's 2016 Album MONGO. Filmed at the former artist-run space THE BELL FOUNDRY in Baltimore, Maryland. "Did Dat" premiered online via THE FADER. 

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Narrative Short Film • 14 min. (2016)

Credits: Written, Directed, Filmed, & Edited by Corey Hughes. Starring Harley Hollenstein. Original Score by George Cessna.

Synopsis: A slapstick comedy in super slow motion. An unnamed tourist with a leg injury searches for physical and spiritual healing on a week long Carnival cruise vacation from Baltimore to the Bahamas. Floating between narrative, documentary, and experimental tendencies the film creates an atmosphere similar to that of being on the ship itself, weightlessly and nauseously gliding through surreal and absurd environments. 

Project Info: My first short film. Filmed with a 3 person cast/crew on a week long Carnival cruise. Ouchiemongo premiered at a free screening event held at the Baltimore performance space Floristree in 2015. The event included works by Baltimore artists, a tropical cocktail bar, and a performance by the "Official Steel Drum Band of Baltimore." The screening was named as a Top 20 Art Moment of 2015 by BmoreArt. The film premiered online via NoBudge and was awarded a 2016 NoBudge award for "Best Experimental Film."

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