When I'm unfocused I often start to put together a video to help concentrate my mind. It can be anything really and often the result is less than 30 seconds long. Sometimes I upload them to YouTube, sometimes I don't. Here are three recent examples of my idle mind.
First up is The Bump and Grind Boogie Woogie. I have tons of old vintage photos as well as tons of old sound effects and royalty free music clips. I took four pics of an anonymous couple from long ago, a thirty second snippet of a generic bebop number and threw them together for a bit of momentary focus. Here's the result:
Next up is We are Legion. My wife and I were taking a walk downtown last week and passed through a neighborhood on our way there. To my delight there were a couple of thousand blackbirds milling about and always having my camera on me, pulled it out and began to shoot just as they flew up and over my head en masse. My immediate thought was, "When I get home I must make this demonic!" And so I wrote and recorded some of my patented freaky music and the results are below:
This last one is probably the hardest to explain. Not what it is, that's easy. It's the "why" that's hard. See, I pulled out some old stock footage I bought about fifteen years ago on an ancient CD and was sifting through it. There was an inordinate amount of footage of hospital scenes so I grabbed some cheesy eighties stock music I had, picked the scenes that fit best, edited them together in cheesy eighties local commercial style and produced a nursing school commercial circa 1986. Why? Not really sure myself except that I wanted to reproduce the look and feel of the types of local commercial seen in the eighties and personally I think I succeeded. What's the point of it all? Got me. Enjoy:
Outside of that I continue to work on bigger film projects including installments of The Land Before CGI and I'm tinkering with the idea of doing trailers for TOERIFC to help promote it more. I have a much bigger short film I want to do but don't have the proper technical facilities to do it so for now I must wait, unfortunately. Also, I'd need about a hundred extras and well, I couldn't pay anyone. But I'll keep plugging away as always. And now back to random short films that mean nothing. It's what I do.
12 comments:
"...entertainment purposes only."
Nicely done sir.
Thank you Bob! I know it's all very odd but I was really pleased with the end result on that faux-eighties nursing school commercial. Thanks for reading the disclaimer.
Ah, Lapperville, OH. I remember visiting there once in the 80s and it was just as it appears in this video. That cheesy music was even playing all the time everywhere I walked, pumped into the town over loudspeakers.
Sometimes I still get nostalgic for good ol' Lapperville.
I will be an extra in your film, without any pay. Of course, I'll want my own trailer and personal assistant, you fucking cheapskate.
Yes Ed, good old Lapperville. 'twas a hell of a place it was! Beer by the yard and comely lasses as far as the eye could see! But that nursing school was dangerous and it wasn't long before the whole got sucked down into the vortex of despair it created.
Rick, are you good runner? Good form? Cause that's what I'm looking for. And I can't give you a trailer but I can give you a trailer hitch. You can kind of, you know, play with it or something in between takes.
Would this film you're making by any chance be centered on the students of the Nursing School? You know, a story of fun, yet naive young ladies who seek to make their world a better place - until the evil of the school begins to take hold of them. It starts slowly of course - a relaxing of certain morals, prescription drugs going missing, little slips of scalpels at inopportune moments - until it devolves into buckets of blood and rampant lesbianism. Or has that been done to death?
And if I'm gonna be an extra, I want to stay at the Lapperville Inn. I hear it has HBO. That'll be awesome!
Greg, my form is never very good.
Bob, that kind of story never goes out of style. You can be the script supervisor. And the Lapper Inn has all the amenities: color tv (sometimes), nice big 13 inch screen, 7 different channels to choose from, continental breakfast of whatever happens to be leftover from that morning's Krispy Kreme run and of course maid service, once a month.
Rick, you're fired.
the guys that are re-making The Birds,should see your clip there and remember ,nature often provides better special effects... ;o)
It does. I couldn't help but immediately think of The Birds when that happened. My only regret is that I turned the camera to follow them too quickly in my opinion. I should have held it on the approaching flock another beat before moving it to the right but in the heat of the moment things rarely achieve perfection.
Post a Comment