W. TRENT WELSTEAD

Welcome to the world of Clock-Boy, where the idiosyncrasies of campus culture exist only in the absurd.

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Mark Meardon and I created Clock-Boy as a personal project for a campus film competition held at Virginia Tech, having previously worked together in smaller capacities on several films for our various cinema courses. Returning to Campus MovieFest for the first time since Kyle and I had created A Grey World (2014) three years prior, I was hungry to finish what we started. No longer lacking the most fundamental knowledge of film production, I knew that with the right partner, and a unique concept, we would have a decent shot at success. At the very least, the time constraints of the competition would motivate me to create something different, distant from the somewhat formulaic structure of my previous three films, all conventional narratives.

The film was shot in its entirety within 72 hours and edited quite literally overnight, in an effort to meet the submission deadline with a quality cut. In regards to location, in keeping with the themes of ‘campus culture’, Clock-Boy was filmed entirely on the campus of Virginia Tech, practically self-funded on a budget of roughly $150, utilizing most of my own personal equipment and props. The story of Clock-Boy was crafted out of my attempts to examine the oddities and subtleties of campus culture. I was particularly interested in exploring these concepts through the lens of absurdism, enabling me to create somewhat of a fantasy world through which these vignettes could take form. Who is Clock-Boy? Why are we invited into his mind to address these subjects? In order to aid these themes, I sought to create a structure which served as a hybrid between an experimental and narrative format. 

Though my primary hope has always been that viewers simply enjoy the finished product, I'm happy to say this has been my most successful project to date, in regards to screenings and accolades. In August 2018, Clock-Boy received distribution via Amazon Prime.