University student Darrick Landreneau may be best known for his gameday attire on Saturday nights in Death Valley, but his everyday life revolves around something entirely different.
The 20-year-old political science junior is easy to spot on campus — for the last 706 days, he’s carried around a video camera in hopes of producing what he calls “a point-of-view college movie.”
Landreneau, who studied broadcast journalism in high school, first started filming on Oct. 12, 2012, and said he films an average of four hours of footage a day. 21-year-old marketing junior Caleb Phillips helps edit the thousands of hours of footage collected and occasionally steps behind the camera himself. He cited the raw feel their project has as one of the reasons it’s so distinct.
“We’ve documented everything,” Phillips said. “My relationship with my girlfriend, our relationship with each other, everything.” The project, the pair’s “first big project together,” is titled “From My Eyes” and could include footage of anything and everything that’s happened to the two since they first stepped foot on campus two years ago.
“Obviously, we can’t have everything we want to in the movie,” Landreneau said. There’s literally thousands of hours of film. Just 1 percent of that is still 10 hours.”
Regardless, Landreneau and Phillips said they will make a concerted effort to try to balance a little bit of everything — the exciting, the mundane and everything in between.
There isn’t any particular method to what the camera films, Landreneau said. He did say, however, that he usually doesn’t film in class.
“Most of college isn’t class —it’s what we do outside of class that’s going to be remembered,” he said, adding that he wants the movie “to be as real as possible.”
Despite what their majors may suggest, Landreneau and Phillips both said this is something they want to do for the rest of their lives. Landreneau wants to direct and occasionally act, and Phillips wants to film and direct as well.
“From the first time I got behind a camera, I knew I was home,” Landreneau said. “My dad always told me, ‘If you wake up every morning doing something you love, you’ll never work another day of your life.’”
Both Landreneau and Phillips, who now work in video post-production for the University, cited the way that movies can affect people, both comedically and on a deeper level, as a primary reason for wanting to become filmmakers.
“The chance to make millions laugh is priceless,” Landreneau said.
“Every now and then, there’s a movie that makes you think, you know, that sparks conversation … We want to make one of those movies,” he added.
“I want to live a life worth filming,” Landreneau said, adding that his purpose for the movie, while not specific, could be summed up by the final line of the series finale of “The Office”:
“There’s beauty in ordinary things, and isn’t that kind of the point?”