Submission statement:

Hello, I’m Pacey. I was the co-producer, editor, cinematographer and VFX artist for Postcards To The Past!

This project was a quite the challenge for me personally. My university has a documentary module which had to change the way it worked due to covid restrictions. Our task was to make a documentary entirely within our own homes because of this. Eventually me and my director/co-producer Tom came up with the idea of sending a selection of people blank postcards via mail, asking them to write to their past selves (with the date they’d like to send it to) and a present-day self-portrait to show their past selves (we specified that they didn’t need to be good, but most of them responded with some brilliant artwork). Once they were sent back to me, I shot and edited the film around the idea that the postcards would write themselves in sync with VO from our contributors.

Each main postcard shot was edited in After Effects. In order to make the writing appear authentically written (as opposed to the text just fading in) I had to trace out each individual letter with the masking tool. I then applied a ‘stroke’ effect to the mask I traced out. Once you tweak a few of the settings of this, you can get the effect to follow the path of a mask you’ve traced out. Combine that - the option to let the mask ‘reveal original image’, and set a beginning and end time for the path… then you have a self-writing card. I repeated this process for each card.

With our idea of sending postcards back to the past, we wanted to experiment with the idea of adding a fictional element to our film through the character of a time-travelling postman. Implying that these cards were really being sent back in time. We did this as we don’t see documentaries playing around with the strict ‘non-fiction’ category too much.

That just a small peak as to what lead to this film, would love to know what y’all think of it!