Bedside Studio: Julieta Ramos Correa & Finding Her Visual Identity

There is a specific kind of creative honesty that is rare and a little hard to look at directly, the kind where someone tells you they are still in the middle of it, not on the other side with a tidy lesson, not packaging the journey retrospectively into something clean and quotable, but genuinely, actively in the process of becoming. Julieta Ramos Correa has that honesty in abundance. She is a filmmaker, videographer, and photographer from St. Augustine, Florida, currently in her junior year of college and roughly three months into the most significant creative shift of her life so far. She is not sure where it is going yet. She is completely okay with that. And talking to her, you will be too.

This is her episode. And we are so glad she trusted us with her story.

Ask Julieta what runs through all of her work and she does not talk about technique or aesthetic first. She talks about a feeling she has had since middle school.

"I always felt like the odd one out in any social setting. It used to be a burden, even an insecurity. But now I've kind of used it as a tool for my art."

The wild imagination that made her feel like she did not quite fit anywhere turned out to be exactly the thing that made her work stand out. Not in a loud, look-at-me way but in the quieter, more interesting way, the way where people watch something she has made and cannot entirely explain why they cannot look away.

She describes her work as something she creates to learn from. Every project is one step closer to pinning down her visual identity, but she is not in a rush to arrive there. "That's the fun part," she says simply. "I just like creating to create."

That sentence sounds easy. For someone who spent two years pushing against a filmmaking style that never quite fit, it took a lot of work to actually mean it.

Julieta came into college knowing she wanted to make films but with no real roadmap for what kind. So she did what most people do when they are uncertain: she followed the people around her. And the people around her were making traditional Hollywood-style narrative films, 30 minutes minimum, central plotline, multiple scenes, the kind of thing you submit to festivals.

She tried. She pushed herself through it. She even ran the student filmmakers association her school did not have yet, building it from scratch in her freshman year, producing three semester films as president, giving dozens of students their first real experience on a film set.

And she was good at it. The club was a success. People loved it. They kept coming back.

But somewhere inside all of that, she was starting to go quiet.

"I felt like I was neglecting my own film style and what I wanted to do specifically. I was burnt out."

The turning point came, as many real turning points do, during a period of doing absolutely nothing productive. She was exhausted and just watching things that did not require much of her. Fashion films. Runway shows. Video essays about Vogue and Vivienne Westwood. And slowly, something started to surface.

"I realized there was a world out there where filmmaking didn't have to be sophisticated or profound. It could just be pretty looking, or even weird looking."

Then she came across a Gucci film. And something clicked.

"This is right up my alley. This is exactly what I want to do."

She stepped down as club president the following semester. Not because she stopped caring about the club but because she cared about it too much to stay in a role she could not give everything to. Her vice president, more passionate about that style of filmmaking, took over. She started building her own portfolio. And the films she actually wanted to make finally started getting made.

Before the Gucci film, before the fashion film revelation, there was Escape.

Julieta made it for a Super 8 millimeter class, and she knew from the start that she wanted the film to match the strange, textured beauty of the medium. So she made something about a French lady-in-waiting who encounters a group of cult-like figures dancing on a beach in white dresses, gets drawn into their world, and slowly, over the course of the film, becomes one of them.

No dialogue. Just ocean sounds and visual language and the whole thing filmed on Kodak 8mm.

She sent the film to a lab in Chicago to be scanned. It came back with the first half intact and the second half almost pitch black.

"I was devastated at first. I was like, my film is ruined. What am I going to do?"

Then she thought about it for a second. The second half of the film, the part that was now nearly black, was the part where the character gets given a drugged cookie and starts to lose herself. The darkness was not an accident anymore. It was the film working out something she had not planned.

"I leaned into it. And I was editing this the day before I had to present to my class. I still don't know how people reacted. But it didn't really matter to me because I was really proud of it."

That was the film that started everything. The one that showed her that mistakes, especially hers, were not things to apologize for. They were the texture of the work.

Here is how Julieta makes a film. She hears a song she likes and starts visualizing it, not necessarily matching the lyrics but following the beats and instrumentals somewhere in her imagination. She ends up with an image or a scene or a feeling. She works backwards from there.

First she decides on the camera. Then how many subjects. Then colors, props, wardrobe. Then, eventually, somewhere in the middle of all of that still happening entirely in her head, she picks up a piece of paper and writes a very vague outline.

"I hate this term, but it kind of just describes how I work. I just go off of vibes."

She has ADHD, and she says it openly and matter-of-factly, as something that shaped her relationship with the more structured side of filmmaking and sent her toward something that actually fits how her brain moves. Rigid pre-production used to exhaust her. The pressure to have everything planned and organized and accounted for was part of what made traditional filmmaking feel like a wall.

The looser she lets herself be during production, the better the work gets.

Her film Office Mayhem, inspired by a song she loved and the energy of The Devil Wears Prada, was shot across two days in her school's photo studio with props she carried from her dorm room herself. She gave her models a scenario, told them to imagine they were going crazy in an office, and let them run with it.

"If I had planned out exactly what I wanted them to do, it might have felt stagnant, even robotic. Letting them do what they wanted ended up being really fun. You could see their personality in the film."

The films she worries about the most in pre-production, the ones she tries to control most tightly, tend to be the ones that feel most stiff. The ones she makes some room in, that she leaves just loose enough for things to go slightly sideways, those are the ones she is most proud of.

We asked Julieta to define creative freedom. Not as a concept but as something real and personal to her, something she has actually lived.

She thought about it and then said this:

She is three months into a major shift in direction. She does not have the portfolio fully built yet. She is not on the other side of the story. She is very much still in it, exploring, experimenting, figuring out what she is capable of when she stops trying to make the films she thought she was supposed to make.

And somehow that is the most compelling thing about her. Not the films she has already made, though those are genuinely interesting. But the fact that she is right here, in this, doing the hard and exciting and uncertain work of becoming, and she is doing it with her eyes open and her journal full and her Canon camera ready and absolutely no idea yet where it all leads.

"I'm not at that point yet," she says, talking about the levels she hopes to reach. "But I'm very motivated. And I know if I keep just being myself with my filmmaking, I'm going to get there."

We believe her completely.