I am a huge fan of the show Severance, and like many others, I’ve been so impressed with everything the production team has been able to accomplish – the multilayered world building, mystery after mystery, lovable (and hateable) characters, comedic timing, direction, cinematography – the whole shebang!

And I preface this all by saying I don’t want to take anything away from what the Severance crew has done with this series or try and put the hard work of a fellow woman director Jessica Lee Gagné in a negative light.

But I know from working as a storyboard artist that references and inspiration videos / images get pulled from everywhere when a production is planning our their project, and sometimes that stuff makes it to the final cut.

When watching the episode Chikhai Bardo, the shots felt incredibly familiar. As the relationship montage was unfolding, I saw moments and shots, sometimes exact frames, that aligned with a video I directed, shot, and edited for artist The Broadest Blue called “Oh, Love” back in 2018/2019.

Now, my friend posted this comparison video I made to Reddit, and many people dismissed this as just a coincidence, claiming that both of our videos depicted a “generic” relationship montage that has been replicated many times. They suggested that anyone looking to make a relationship montage would include the exact same shots, style, and activities.

That’s just plain wrong.

Before I even shared my thoughts with anyone regarding the similarities, I did my homework.

I put myself in the shoes of the Severance production team, and imagined, “If I was tasked with directing this episode, and wanted to do relationship flashback scenes with super 8 and other film effects and light leaks, as well as show the relationship breaking down at the end, what references could I use to show my team and get them on the same page?”

Market Research

I tried many search terms: super 8 romance, super 8 couples in love, super 8 romance montage, romance montage film, romance montage ideas, nostalgic love story, nostalgic vintage love story, vintage style love romance video, vintage couple aesthetic, super 8 film leaks love story effects, nostalgic filmic vintage video aesthetic, nostalgic vintage film style love story effects, nostalgic vintage film style love video, retro vintage aesthetic love story video effect, vintage love story film effect video reference….. MANY more

And what I found was:

• Super 8 film references were mostly wedding and engagement videos, lots of wedding dresses, sometimes old-timey costumes, often outdoor locations, only showing the lovey-dovey side of romance, NO fighting or drama. Natural lighting.
  • Common activities: hand holding wile walking, walking along or playing in the shallow water of a beach, sharing an umbrella in the rain, running in public – along a side walk or other public place (displacing pigeons), running or dancing on large grassy hills, on a small boat, the woman holding a bouquet of flowers, getting married, playing with wedding veil
• Super 8 film references with light leak effects and editing similar to our videos often were travel content videos, or actual old-school films taken back in the day.
• Nostalgic video aesthetic could be found on TikTok of couples in modern clothing being cute, but those videos were UGC and not refined or narrative, not showing any fighting or story arc.
• Romance montages or films that included similar content to our videos (kitchen and other interior locations, modern costumes, couples doing activities other than hugging and kissing), NO super 8 nor did they have light leaks or a similar editing style, and instead were often “staged” looking, with artificial lighting and are a mixed bag of costumes and time periods.
  • Common moments: dramatic and clear eye contact in close up and mid close up portrait shots (first dramatic, then smiling), scene where couple dances in fancy dress at a big party (debut as a couple), private moments in an otherwise busy public space such as a concert or sports game, moving in together and dancing in an empty home full of boxes, driving, motorcycle, riding bikes, movie theater, playful activity in an amusement park, having dinner / feeding each other food, LOTS of kissing scenes, meeting partner at their place of work, kissing in the rain
• Documentary-style depictions of couples together with natural lighting featured scenarios and activities that were completely different from any activities and scenes in our projects (like doing acrobatics, giving a tattoo, stuff that wouldn’t be useful to someone putting together a creative deck for this episode).

I spent a not-insignificant amount of time looking into this.

And what I found was – the only video that consistently came up in search results and which had the most similarities to the episode both in content, framing, camera movement, and editing, was OUR VIDEO. 

While I was able to use our music video to recreate all major flashback scenes from the episode, there was not one other single video that I could find online that could do the same thing. Clips, sure. A clip from one wedding video here, a clip from one blockbuster there, a scene from a travel video there – could possibly Frankenstein together to create an echo of the episode flashbacks scenes in Chikhai Bardo. But no other singular project, taken on its own, could do the same.

Search Engine Optimization

Back in the day, I made a blog post featuring the “Oh Love” music video as well as other videos where I’d used special techniques that I invented to shoot and edit this style of video (specifically for those on a budget, without the use of actual film). I used a TON of best practice SEO (search engine optimization) to optimize that blog post and increase visibility across many search results looking for similar videos.

I did this in the hopes that people would find my website and hire me to create this kind of video, which I’d been developing over many years and was heavily influenced by my work as an oil painter and performance artist.

But this also made it easy to find for anyone just searching for references or inspiration to make such videos.

David and Goliath

Many folks don’t know what goes into creating a typical film or tv show. Hundreds of hours, and dozens of crew members and teams of people are all involved in making decisions about every single detail that makes its way on screen. Nothing in film is a “coincidence” and even if something unexpected does occur on set, the choice to put it into the edit and not leave it on the cutting room floor is intentional.

Some people have responded to this comparison by saying that the Severance version is better. Well of course it’s better – they had 18 million dollars and the aforementioned dozens of crew, departments, and support teams to make it all come together, whereas our video was much less… and the entire crew was moi.

So for very obvious reasons, the Severance version has elements in it like the timelapse and thousands of dollars worth of equipment and manpower that we could never dream of 6 years ago as low-budget indie filmmakers.

Accusations of Self Promotion

This video is 6 years old. Am I proud of it? Yes, I think it was good for what we could do at the time. But to be honest, I’ve made many other projects since then that I’d rather people see, where I had higher budgets and was able to create something more complex.

But as a filmmaker, it’s also my responsibility to stand up for and defend my work. It can’t really defend itself.

And if this was a song, for example – where the similarities and genre were THIS striking – there would be an expectation of some acknowledgement at least.

As a storyboard artist, I have worked on MANY projects where I have witnessed certain reference videos imitated so closely that the final product is unmistakably similar – from Hollywood blockbuster clips to TikTok’s. And the only way it gets called out of course, is if the original filmmaker or artist happens to see that video, notices the similarities, and then trusts their gut enough to share their findings publicly.

Like I said, I LOVE the show, but as this episode unfolded, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach start to form. And as more and more scenes unfolded, and I remembered what it was like to shoot and edit those scenes, I started feeling “pithed.”

There was a story I once read about a woman who suddenly lost all sense of self. She, for unknown reasons, developed a neurological condition where she lost her proprioception – or her sense of being within and connected to her own body.

That’s how it felt.

While there’s others who might have a similar eye or have a similar edit rhythm, I think the thing about doing an indie on-woman-band type project is that you don’t have a lot of money, so you have to put your heart and soul into it.

Eventually, I couldn’t even concentrate on the episode anymore, I was just waiting with bated breath to see what else might have been lifted, only to see my fears validated by further scenes which lined up to so many elements of our music video.

Personal Attacks

There have been many comments that were hateful toward me, but one stood out the most:

As a small Asian woman and as an adoptee / former foster youth, I’ve been constantly assumed to be MUCH younger than I am and therefore less experienced, less capable, and less deserving of respect. This has contributed to countless lost career opportunities, as well as verbally and physically abusive employment situations – even sexual assault on set.

It’s a dangerous bias, that has slowed down or halted the careers of many young women in the industry. It just gets really tiring having to prove your resume over and over again, and to see other people get opportunities you know you’d excel at, just because those other people “looked” or “sounded” more capable than you.

In my early career, I had many people tell me to my face that I didn’t “look” like a director. To just give up. Don’t waste your time. Your voice is too soft, you’re too short, and no one will take you seriously.

And I know that this problem to do with me physically, because back in the day when I was fully focused on only directing music videos, my name would get me many gigs, and people hung up the phone when they heard a young woman’s voice on the other line. Potential clients always assumed I was the “secretary” or “assistant” and I had to clarify that I was in fact, the director. I was even accused of using a fake name, which, again, as an adoptee, was infuriating (transracial adoptees often have a disconnect with the way they look and their name, leading to a lot of problems).

I often wonder how many clients would never would have approached me if they saw a more feminine name on my social media or website. When I was coming up in the industry here in NYC, other women directors with more feminine names I met struggled HARD to get any gigs.

But in any case – what this comment said is completely inaccurate if Gagné had been “working in the industry” for 25 years today. At 36/37 years old, she would have been 11 at her first paid gig as a Director of Photography.

We are the same age, have been in the industry for the same amount of time, and based on her wiki page describing how she started making images at a young age, we probably “picked up a camera” around the same age as well. Even though arguably I didn’t take film and video seriously as a job until after collage, my Dad was very much into tech, and got me my first camcorder when I was a kid. I carried that thing everywhere I went, and took countless clips of me and my friends doing silly things. I was always the “documentarian” in the friend groups, and that really was the building blocks of my approach to shooting and editing this style of video today.