Now a bona fide filmmaker: Spencer Wilkins ’21
Wilkins, a Bowdoin 2021 graduate currently in the second year of a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa, decided to address the issue of his social anxiety in a video essay as part of his coursework. “I majored in English at Bowdoin, but I’ve always been passionate about film. In high school I used to make music videos.”
This project, however, was unlike anything Wilkins had done before. “I knew I wanted to write something about loneliness, connection, and friendship.” He decided he would shoot the film entirely in the Mall of America, a hundred-acre retail space near the Twin Cities in Minnesota and the largest shopping mall in the western hemisphere.
“This seemed like a great backdrop for a story about human connections because it’s so densely populated.” Wilkins ended up spending three days in the mall without leaving. “I lived in a hotel within the mall and ended up with about four hours of footage, all shot on my smartphone.” Wilkins did not write the script until after he had gathered the footage because he didn’t want any preconceived ideas about what shots he should get. “What I did was look at every single shot and then write a sentence that would correspond to it. I ended up with about 240 sentences, which I then edited into a thirteen-minute video essay.”