Path to Papa (Tribute to My Grandpa)

My grandpa passed away on April 1st, 2018, and I was inspired by an experience on the five-year anniversary of his death to make this film.
I made this film in the Spring of 2023, and it is the final film that I made while in film school. This film doubled as my final project for both my Personal Cinema class and Cinematography class.
For the Personal Cinema class, I could do pretty much anything I wanted, as long as it was a documentary-type film based on something in my personal life. For my Cinematography class, I could make pretty much anything I wanted as long as it looked good.
One suggestion that I had from the Cinematography class was to recreate an image. Throughout the semester, my Cinematography class was recreating still images from Hollywood films, where the students in my class acted as directors, cast, and crew. In the same spirit, my professor suggested I recreate an image of my grandpa using myself as the actor. You can see this toward the end of the film, where I wore similar clothes to my grandpa and recreated an image I had of him from a couple years before he died.
One of the biggest aspects of this film is what was one of the biggest aspects of my relationship with my grandpa: camping. I went camping with my grandpa in the Wisconsin Dells for the first nine years of my life, and they are some of my most cherished memories to this day.
This was not the first film that I have made about my grandpa, but it was the first film I made about him for film school.
The shots in this film are a mixture of archive footage of mine (all the clips of my grandpa) as well as new footage that I shot just for it (like the drone footage).