Fanfare was meant to refer to the container–the bookends and the constant audience presence–while Higher Education was the film-within-a-film (thus Fanfare for Higher Education).

I shot the 17-minute short during the first half of 2002. Context: a month after I finished the project I became legally able to drink, which is why I haven’t made a film since. Just kidding–drinking is why I haven’t made a good film since. Just kidding–everyone starts drinking before 21 anyway. Looking back on it, it was a fairly implausible undertaking: I was solely responsible for writing, casting, directing, shooting, editing, compositing, mixing, scoring half of it, and–ah yes–attending the rest of my classes at the same time. As one of my professors asked me after the screening, “was it worth missing all of those classes for?”

Put it this way: the struggle to produce this project was one of the most educational experiences of my life. On the other hand, the professor’s class that I skipped several times… well, I can’t even remember the title of that course.

One of the particular challenges inherent to Fanfare was the director-by-proxy concept. Since the director of the Higher Education is an actual character in Fanfare, it was necessary to direct the film-within-a-film as he would direct it, rather than the way I would (not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t likely write a voiceover-laden film about selling drugs in the first place). Because of this device, I couldn’t show off my own writing and directing chops–not a good situation to put yourself in if you’re a young student filmmaker trying to… show off your writing and directing chops. It was a challenge: on one hand I wanted to create an entertaining short film for a Middlebury audience made up of my peers, some of whom I wanted to date, while on the other hand I wanted to belittle the kind of drugs-are-cool action flicks that were popular among many of my peers, some of whom I wanted to fight. Viewing the film today, it’s fairly evident that I couldn’t make up my mind about whether to attack or defend the director character (“Tyler Simon”). By hedging my bets, I may have effectively negated both viewpoints: I didn’t sabotage the film-within-a-film as much as I should have, while I also didn’t get to show off what I was capable of as a writer/director working with “my own” material.

It may be that the whole director-by-proxy idea stemmed from my own insecurities as a filmmaker–that, or just the general knowledge that I wasn’t ready to live up to my own expectations were I to undertake writing something “from the heart,” a scary prospect indeed for a jaded college Junior.

If your first reaction to the on-screen audience was, “this looks like Mystery Science Theater 3000,” you wouldn’t be the first. While I never had cable TV as a kid, I had surely seen episodes of the show; nevertheless, I didn’t realize the similarity until after I’d written the script. Once I realized it was going to look a lot like MST3K, I experimented with other methods of having the audience present, but given that I didn’t want to cut between the two–I wanted the actual viewer of the film to see Higher Education with the persistent presence of a second audience between them and the film itself–I decided that this was really the most logical way to do it, MST3K be damned.

“Cryptomnesia” is an applicable term coined by Carl Jung, which is defined as our ability to create something we think is original, when we’re unconsciously being derivative of another work we’d seen earlier and had just lost immediate recall of. Backing this up is an instance where my freshman roommate Ben Campbell (who did some of the music in this very film) wrote a song (which I produced–our creative crew was, and, as you will see in a couple months, is–very incestuous) that we discovered months later shared an almost identical melody to Bob Marley’s “Guava Jelly,” which Ben had certainly heard once or twice before but no more than that.

All of that said, if I ripped off the idea of writing the audience into the original work itself, it’s more likely that I lifted it from Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound. Credit where credit’s due.

As written, the ending was supposed to include a second audience, appearing in the same silhouetted manner, looking through the reverse side of the movie screen at the first audience. I simply didn’t have the time to shoot it, however, especially in light of the limited resources I had used to shoot the first audience: I mail-ordered a giant roll of green paper, taped it across a chalkboard in a classroom, turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, and filmed the visual component of the audience in one take (I promised the actors they’d be done by 11pm and the DV tape for them to watch wasn’t done exporting until 10:45). I shouted out directions as we filmed and then later taped each actor’s audio individually in a soundbooth. Here is a picture of this ultra high-budget greenscreen setup (and by “ultra high-budget,” I mean, $20):

It took a hell of a lot of tweaking to get a clean pull off that greenscreen–and while there are still a lot of flaws, it’s pretty damn good, considering. Which is probably how I’d evaluate the film as a whole, at least technically.

Another example of limited-resource-fulness: we only had one prop gun. So the shot of the two guns in the case together was actually two separate shots merged, and we staged the later scene with Damian Washington’s character getting shot in the back such that our sole gun never needed to be in the same shot. Also, due to my PC being below Adobe Premiere’s minimum system requirements, I almost didn’t make it to my own screening with a tape in hand–only after making last-minute hardware adjustments did I finally get the “Export to Tape” function to work–at 6:55, for a 7 o’clock screening. After shooting and editing the entire project digitally, it was incongruous to have to sit there and wait for the 17-minute film record out to tape in real-time.

Considering the whole thing was shot on my personal camera (which I’d won for an earlier video) with a budget of less than $150 and completed start-to-finish in a matter of months, I was… realistically proud of it. Today, probably none of it is usable on my reel, but the experience of finding out just how well Murphy’s Law applies to film production was an invaluable one. Also, I learned another valuable lesson: spend more time writing.

Still, my experience shooting Fanfare was perhaps the final bullet point on my “reasons not to go to film school” list–despite being the only student during my years at Middlebury to have any success getting work into outside festivals, I was given a “B” on the project because I missed some of the rough cut deadlines. A year later, I was told that I was ineligible to do a senior film because of my “disqualifying” grade, and while they later “made an exception” for me, it was a pretty pitiful tangle of red tape to have to wade through. And there I was thinking that it was a teacher’s job to encourage creativity.

And thus No Film School. To quote a movie no one will ever show in film school: “If you no help me now…I say, fuck you Jobu. I do it myself.”

Apologies for the video quality; the original file is much better, but this web version (circa 2001) is all I have handy.

Re-watching the video six years removed, I think it still looks remarkably good, considering when/why/how it was made (the indoor scenes don’t look so hot, but they were shot as desperate last-middle filler because the weather was being uncooperative–not exactly uncommon in Vermont). Conceptually the video is nothing special, but hey… I was 19.

And now, for no one’s benefit other than my own, some memories of the video:

Equipment: I used the school’s Sony VX-1000 (the camera that kicked off the whole DV revolution, really), a friend’s CD boombox, and 8 “D” batteries (which cost me $41, comprising 100% of the video’s budget). I digitized the footage using a home-built PC through an analog video cable (sure, the VX had firewire, but I didn’t), and edited it using Adobe Premiere 5.1 and a friend’s red TV from Japan (yes, you read that right: the TV itself was inexplicably red). All the effects were done in Premiere.

Awards, fanfare, honorariums: 2000 was a different time for nonprofessional video; DV cameras were not yet widely available, online video was really just a concept at the time, and broadband itself didn’t have nearly the penetration it does now. A site named FirstEye (now-defunct), vying to be an early YouTube, started a contest for user-submitted, eye-catching short videos. The Grand Prize was a Sony VX-2000 camera, worth about $3500. When I found out about the contest, I uploaded Wicked Harmonies; three months later, I received an email saying the judges had awarded me the grand prize. I’ve since flipped the camera on eBay for a newer model several times over, but if it hadn’t been for that initial award… a lot of things would probably be different.

Even more memories!

–There are a couple parts where Ben is obviously lip-syncing. I kept shouting at him, “actually sing! It looks fake when you don’t!”

–Reduced Phat was a production “company” I started in high school. Damian shouts it out in the song.

–I didn’t know the school’s Bogen tripods could actually go lower than thigh-height, which is why all my low-angle shots in the video are filmed from about three feet off the ground.

–Ben, hippie that he was, didn’t have a lot of clothes. The gray hoodie he wore for much of the video was, in fact, mine; mysteriously, it later disappeared.

–For both the recording of the song and the video, Ben borrowed my bass guitar (and, being a southpaw, skillfully played it upside-down); unfortunately, while trying to climb on top of the structure to shoot the triplicate scene, he slipped (hippies don’t wear shoes) and fell right on top of Your Mom. Your Mom was the name of my bass, a moniker given expressly so one could say, “I’m playing/stroking/slapping Your Mom.” Yes, that kind of stuff made me laugh… and still does.

–The jump cuts during the indoor dancing scene, halfway through the video, are there because I had to cut out a student opening a hallway door and walking right in front of Ben and co. while we were filming. In fact, if you look closely, the door is closed for the first half of the scene and open for the latter; whoever heard of multiple takes?

–At the first screening of student video projects at Middlebury, Wicked Harmonies received a standing ovation from a packed house; the audience at the second screening, more sparse and mellow, didn’t show it the same enthusiasm. My girlfriend at the time attended the second screening; I remember walking away from the whole experience thinking, damn, I wish she would have been there for that first one.

Here are the opening 30 seconds of the broadcast:

What. Are. The odds.

While it’s not a lingering shot, there’s no mistaking… the size of my head. It’s twice the cubic volume of anyone else’s. Look at it! It’s going to cause an eclipse.

The question at hand is this: why did the producers focus on me of all people, when there were 66,000 other fans to choose from? Indeed, where were all the ladies in the crowd? What was ESPN thinking? Integral to every soccer broadcast is the gratuitous shot of the alluring female fan in facepaint and very little clothing, cheering her team on. When this is shown, viewers in cafes and pubs the world over have a transcendant, multicultural, boundary-crossing moment together. They utter verbal confirmations in their respective languages. They miraculously gain an immediate understanding of her nation’s history, culture, architectural innovations, and water quality. Some will even derive the unemployment rate and purchasing power parity. So every time a broadcast cuts to a fan of the fairer sex, citizens around the world are brought closer together… but ESPN chose to focus on me instead. Because of this decision, small-scale wars are being waged in Third World countries as we speak, involving black-market, second-hand firearms. In the middle of a war-torn street, a baby is left abandoned by its mother. It is wearing a newspaper.

The only logical conclusion to draw from all this is that ESPN’s decision to spotlight me with the opening shot of the World Cup was clearly motivated by the support of their parent company–Disney–for the activites of illegal arms trading and baby-abandoning. You heard it here first.

This new version is in response to some constructive criticism I received from the fine frequenters of Creative COW, a forum of media pros (COW stands for Communities Of the World, although if you’re going to capitalize “Of,” to be fair, you should also capitalize “The,” which would make it COTW). The gist of the sentiment there was that my reel was too long, and that my music choice of The Chemical Brothers was questionable. So for this version I decided to buck the really-fast-electronic-music trend, and cut the reel to the O’Jays’ 1975 funk classic “Give The People What They Want,” which I believe is topically hilarious, especially given the current political clime. This new music choice may seem even more questionable than a lyric-free, fast-paced synthesized song–but if someone isn’t going to work with me because of the music on my reel, then it just wasn’t meant to be.

If you do choose to watch this new reel, I hope it’s a more enjoyable minute-and-a-half of your life than the three minutes you may or may not have spent watching the original.

This site is named No Film School because it’s supposed to document what’s it like to try to establish yourself as a filmmaker without going to film school. Yet most of my posts here have been about pop culture–not film theory, or career struggles, or really anything relevant. So, finally, a topical post on this site!

The demo reel is meant to demonstrate your abilities as an editor, cinematographer, or animator–or, in my case, all three–and is usually more important than your resume, education, or personality. Often it trumps anything that would typically matter if you were trying to get a normal, non-film job; the exception is connections, which are even more important than the reel, and which I lack above all else. One of the reasons some people go to film school is to make connections, which in my mind is not a good reason to go to any school.

For my reel I stuck fairly closely to the tried-and-true demo reel formula, which goes like this: cut a visual montage of your best material together and set it to a fast-paced song of the electronica variety, lasting about three to four minutes. Alternately, if you have outstanding material, you can choose a more dramatic, slower song, and hope that you stand out from the crowd precisely because you have veered from the established formula. I, however, did not. This time.

The first song is by The Chemical Brothers (I chopped it up a bit) and the second is by M.I.A., whose work also graces the new Honda Civic commercial, as I recently discovered. Because the idea of a reel is to make it as commercial as possible, and because she has a song featured in a mainstream ad right now, I must therefore be commercially viable, right? Even though I’m told that MTV won’t play her video because she mentions the PLO.

Above all else your reel is supposed to demonstrate craft; there’s not a lot of art or meaning in these things. So don’t expect anything other than me trying to show that I’ve done a lot of stuff, especially given my age (or lack thereof) and the budgets I’ve had (or not had). But if you’ve ever wondered if I have any abilities besides writing opinionated reactions to things I’ve seen/read/heard, here’s your chance to actually watch something. More to come.

In August 2005 I had an idea to boost traffic to my site. It was a really bad idea: I thought, since R. Kelly’s Advanced series Trapped in the Closet is essentially a 20-minute song that uses the same beat throughout, could you take his tale of sexual infidelity and re-cut it to tell an entirely different story? With judicious editing one could rearrange all of his words — while sticking to the beat — and come up with a new, even more ridiculous narrative. Naturally, having nothing better to do — and based on a friend’s opinion that I couldn’t pull it off — I decided to try. The result was a five chapter story in which R. Kelly confesses to a number of sexual infidelities, including several episodes with men.

It worked: the parody received something like 75,000 views in a week (I’m on a different stats system now so I can’t go back that far), and a bunch of comments running the gamut from “this is the funniest thing ever” to “you must be the most pathetic human being in the world.” They’re all preserved here for posterity’s sake (they’re split onto pages, so only the latest are displayed unless you click on the previous page numbers at the bottom).

I knew it was a terrible idea, but since I couldn’t think of anyone else having done this before (that is, mocking a song by using the original singer’s own voice, and taking his words completely out of context), I had to see it through. Also, it goes without saying, although I’m saying it anyway, that the same guy who does ridiculous things like naming an album 12 Play–”because it’s three times better than foreplay”–should have the tables turned on him, sexually. Including the kitchen table. (That was a reference to another song of his, In the Kitchen, which does not touch on any culinary topics, although it may include references to cunnilingus). Because R. Kelly never released an a cappella version of the song, the audio editing took longer than I expected and took some fairly advanced maneuvering to pull off. And yes, I wanted to take the story in a different, preferably more original, direction, but I had to work with what I had–and the lyrics to Trapped in the Closet didn’t really lend themselves to anything else.

Anyway, I still think the resulting song is impressive from an audio editing standpoint, but I’ve taken it down — sorry I couldn’t “keep it on the download.”