Last night I did something that I find terrifying. I put myself in front of an audience. I entered a short film I did a few years ago in The Loft’s monthly short film contest. Push the Tempo did not get rave reviews (a few laughs, a few tepid comments afterward) but it did not get gonged out of the competition and that was all I wanted.
The best part of the movie though is a brief philosophical interlude by Carl who says a great and profound statement while commenting on what he’s seeing (namely me push my old car through Tucson in August to a Fatboy Slim track): It’s silly…inane…pointless…what better thing could there be?
It kind of sums up life, doesn’t it? Silly, inane and pointless most of the time. Maybe all the time if you get a big enough perspective on it. There’s no point and it sure is silly. Recent events in my life continually reaffirm that assertion since I keep having either the same argument with The Recently Lost One, despite my better understanding of everything. How silly inane and pointless is that? Man, life ends up being too hard.
For instance, I miss so many happy moments and I’m so annoyed that everything has turned to shit since I have a deep and profound affection for Natalie. But at least I haven’t been set on fire by angry bears looking for a little forest fire vengeance or slaughtered by the Janjawid milita in the Sudan trying to cleanse the earth with blood when a little degreaser would work far better (Have you ever tried to get blood stains out of white clothing? It ain’t easy.)
So that’s a good thing.
It’s all you’ve got, this crazy madness called life, so this is where the closer line comes in. “What better thing could there be?” Other than to the crazed religious people of all ilk, this all you get, so by the very nature of life, what better thing could there be?
I’ll post Push the Tempo here once I recompress it as the file is too damn large right now and I don’t seem to be able to figure out how to get good quality compression from the software I’ve got. (Anyone know how to do this? Send me a comment.)
Here’s some thumbnails from it until I get off my lazy ass.
[update: I got off my lazy ass. The video to Push the Tempo is now a separate page. You can also just click on any of the images.]
My personal favorite setup:
Video Codec: XviD (http://www.koepi.org)
Audio Codec: LAME mp3 (http://mitiok.cjb.net/)
Encoder: VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.org)
Settings:
Broadband:
XviD: Constant Quality, Quantizer: 4
LAME: 128 kbps
Dialup:
XviD: Constant Quality, Quantizer: 6
LAME: 48 kbps (mono)
You can find numerous guides for using VirtualDub on the Internet.
I’ll have to try that sometime this week as today is just plain old crazy and tomorrow is even crazier.
It’s like I’m in the mind of Charles Manson it’s so freaking crazy.
I was at the Loft’s Film night and I thought your film was a very fine piece! I came here whilst googling for the film so I could send it on to some friends.
It’s hard to convery subtlety in a journal post, but I honestly thought it was an excellent video, given (as you said so yourself) that it is based on one joke - that you didn’t get gonged demonstrated how good it was.
And remember, no matter how many films you make, you will never, ever, make one as bad as that Goat Sucker movie. *shivers with disgust*
Cheers,
Matt
That’s pretty damn cool. I didn’t think anyone would ever think to look for the video.
Now I’ll really have to get off my lazy ass and post the video.
By the way, next month there will be a great little video that I assisted on called Hammerhead in the contest. I finally convinced the director (Tim Gassen) that it would be fun to disgust an entire audience.
Also, if I can make it happen, I might have something else in there called “The Sayings of Pastor Lupe”. They way I’m envisioning it right now it could get me burned at the stake.
They still make stakes at Home Depot right? ‘Cause I’d hate to be burned at one that people had to hand craft. I could get a splinter!
I saw yer video at The Loft too, and it definitely stuck with me because I Googled it now, what, nine months later? Maybe that’s just because my ‘93 Mercury Topaz just died, and I never got the chance to film a car commercial for it, and I’m actually missing the ol’ flying piece of crap.
Anyway, the video for it doesn’t work, and I’m begging you to fix it.