Not A Blog™

[…continued from Wednesday The entire series starts here.]

I started my first real video production job in January of 2002. This was after we had shot A New Oddity, but before we started Taking a Left. I learned a lot during the nine months or so that I was working there, and I got to use that non-linear editing system I had dreamed about way back in eighth grade. I spent part of the money I made working at the studio on a capture card and basic editing software for my own computer. Even when I got it, I knew it was a piece of crap. It made use of some proprietary codecs and it compressed the hell out of the signal from the VCR to get it through the USB port, yielding a picture that looked like total junk, unless you printed it back to VHS where the quality of the medium was poor enough that you couldn’t tell. After working with the professional Avid system at the studio, I could barely stand the limitations of this consumer system, but it was better than nothing. It was editing, and we had it. Finally.

I originally purchased it to edit my Tales From the Script sketch. As I said, I never got a chance to work on it because the playback VCR destroyed the tape. But I was glad I had it anyway, because when we started working on Taking a Left, I was fully intending to use this craptastic editing system to edit the entire movie. I had calculated out on paper how much hard drive space it would take, and determined that I needed a new, dedicated hard drive to handle the project, which I also bought before we started. I was ready.

Well, Taking a Left fell apart—but even before that happened, there was a new event on the horizon. Like any college, the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design had a bulletin board of community events. One of the fliers was advertising a One Minute Film Festival, being sponsored by a local independent film house, Zoetropolis. Every time I passed by the flier, I thought to myself, “there is absolutely no reason we can’t do this. We have no excuses.” I told Dave about it and his response was the same as mine: it’s only a minute. We have to do it. In a flurry of emails, Dave, Aaron and I exchanged ideas and set the shooting date for the next weekend. It was mid-September, and the deadline for entries was October 30. We had six weeks.

I was very excited about this project because it was what I had been wanting to do for two years now. Something short, but effective. Even though we had a tight deadline, it was only one minute worth of production, and it would be a well produced minute. (It turned out that this would be the only TTT production that actually got edited with the crappy system I had bought.)

The idea we settled on was the following. The short would show The TTT—those of us around: Dave, Aaron, and I—thinking about what kind of one minute we would want to do. Suddenly Dave discovers the Hollywood formula: we don’t even need a plot! Just action sequences. The next forty-five seconds shows random action shots interspersed with us referencing back to the fact that the video wasn’t making any sense, and that it wasn’t supposed to, and implying we were just making it up as we went along. At the end, it cuts back to us in the same room still considering the idea. We decide that the idea is just “eh”, not that good. It ends with us apparently deciding not to go with that idea—even though it just finished.

This was a particular kind of self-referential, post-modern humor that I engage in even more today. But it also showed up in some of our older productions, revealing a hidden interest in this style. In Scarlet Ninja, the Scarlet Ninja turns the world upside down to defeat the other two ninjas, whereupon they say that her camera tricks will not work on them. Fatal Killings had the whole Guy #2 gag; and in X-Files, Moldy discovers that the reason he couldn’t get closer to the truth was because the camera was following him everywhere he went, recording his moves.

One Minute is the ultimate in post-modern, self-referential humor, and I think it’s one of my favorite gags out of everything we did. I edited like crazy for two weeks to get it done in time for the film fest, and we even had two CG-composited-with-live-action shots. I put the tape in the mail the day of the deadline.

The film fest was very cool, if only because we had never participated in anything like that before. We didn’t expect to win anything because the awards were given out based on audience votes, and we didn’t really have legions of fans coming to support us. There were fifty one-minute films in all, and while we certainly weren’t the best, I think we were firmly in the middle of the upper half. We were also the first one shown, so by the time the festival was over and the voting happened, everyone had pretty much forgotten about us. The best thing, though, was how we were able to take it from nothing to finished concept in six weeks. I figured if we could keep doing that, we’d have productions all over the place, each only minute or so long, but fun to watch.

It didn’t work out that way. College turned out to be a lot of work and we all remained busy. I eventually left the job I had at the studio because I couldn’t work two jobs and go to school. (I suppose it seems weird that I would leave the production job but keep the teller job—but the job at the bank was much more stable and guaranteed me work as long as I would stay, plus it paid more.) Through all of 2003 we did nothing. We wouldn’t shoot again, in fact, until the spring of 2004, about fifteen months after the success that was One Minute.

Over the winter of 2003/04, I broke down and bought my own video camera. I was required to buy a PowerBook G4 and associated software for school design projects. I knew it was coming, so I had saved up for it through college, but after I purchased it, I was completely wiped out. (In retrospect, I should have bought it with a loan. You live, you learn.) The thing was, however, I knew that if I had a digital video camera, I could hook it up to the Mac via firewire and edit with the free software that came with OSX. I had seen projects a few other people had done and it was getting me inspired to shoot again. Maybe it would help revive The TTT. After purchasing the laptop, I had less than $500 in the bank. I spent $350 of it on a camera. It was the cheapest DV camera available at WalMart—but it had firewire, so I was on the way to editing bliss. A few weeks later I was living paycheck to paycheck, completely flat broke from buying the laptop, software, and camera. At one point, I literally spent seven of the last ten dollars to my name on a DV tape to shoot Mincemeat!.

The winter of 2004 was my second semester as a junior in college. I had a satire class. The mid-term and final projects were supposed to be major deals, but one of the things you were allowed to do was write a satirical screenplay and shoot it. It had to be at least three minutes long, and there were some other stipulations in there, but basically it boiled down to exactly what I had been doing with The TTT, only this time I got a grade for it. Piece of cake.

Both Mincemeat! and A Public Service Announcement were filmed for this particular class. When I started shooting Mincemeat!, I had only the vaguest ideas that I was going to do a parody of a cooking show. My sister was making dinner, so I whipped out the camera and started shooting her. I had nothing written, and I wasn’t getting her to say anything, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. But while I was shooting, it dawned on me: I’d make it a cooking competition—a parody of The Iron Chef. I watched the footage of my sister making dinner again and wrote jokes to fit some of her actions. Then I just needed an appropriately goofy slacker to be her competitor. Fortunately, Aaron still lived in Lancaster. Perfect. Since I had the script with jokes already written, I went over to his house and shot all his scenes in a single afternoon. After some simple editing, a few announcer scenes with my brother and I, and voice-over work supplied by Aaron and myself, the project was done, a full month before it was due.

The class was supposed to collectively grade these projects, and the prof was going to give out a final grade based on what he thought averaged with what the rest of the class thought. Still remembering Scarlet Ninja from so many years ago, I had some trepidation, but I was confident I had improved enough that non-fans of The TTT could approach the work and get something out of it. The short went over well, receiving laughs at all the right spots, but no one went crazy over it. After class the prof pulled me aside. He said he thought my thing was one of the most hilarious things he had ever seen from a student, but the class graded it harshly. The average score came out to a “B”. But he thought it was so much better than that he threw out their collective average and just gave me an “A”. I was pretty happy about this, but it raised in my mind an entirely different question: just who was our audience, anyway?

The same thing basically happened with A Public Service Announcement, the prof liking it even more than Mincemeat! mostly because it was topical. PSA is probably my favorite post-From Beyond project, having a good mix of verbal gags, visual gags, and montages.

As if doing two projects within three months of each other wasn’t crazy enough, it was about April of 2004 that we got another letter from Zoetropolis. They were doing another One Minute Film Fest, and even though the details were scarce, they did provide a deadline. Again it was tight: the end of May. Again: we had six weeks.

Aaron and I got together to brainstorm ideas, but they weren’t as forthcoming as One Minute. Eventually we hashed out a larger over-arching plot we called Midnight Fugue—the Zoetropolis entry being the first “episode” in a series. We wanted the production to stand alone, but also have a sort of cliff-hanger which we could expand upon in later episodes. We incorporated a number of things: I had always wanted to shoot at night, so we did that. I had also wanted to do something with stylized gun violence, inspired by The Matrix, Max Payne, Equilibrium, and Kill Bill, so we put that in. And I had always wanted to do something that was a little more serious with more subtle humor, so we did that, as well.

The resulting one minute of film we simply called Midnight Fugue for entry into the film fest. It involved an unnamed antagonist stealing a case, but setting off an alarm. As they’re escaping the building, the antagonist and his henchmen meet the unnamed protagonist, who they try to gun down. He uses his sword to deflect all the bullets back toward them, killing them, and grabs the case for himself. He takes it home and opens it, finding a can of Dr. Pepper and a DVD. He puts the DVD in the player, and prepares to watch it, when the antagonist comes in and sits down next to him. The look at each other and nod.

It definitely fulfills its role—it’s a stand-alone production depicting sophisticated thievery with a bit of intregue and action, but it also raises enough questions that we could spend time answering them in subsequent episodes. Unfortunately, we never heard back from Zoetropolis after sending this entry in. A few months later, with just a short mention buried in the back of the local paper, Zoetropolis went out of business. Unlike its cousin One Minute, Midnight Fugue was never shown on the big screen.

We actually shot and completed the second episode of Midnight Fugue. I thought either we should only have it be one episode, and just let it stand alone, or have three episodes which made up a little trilogy. Two episodes was kind of awkward, especially since the second introduced more new characters, but didn’t answer any questions. So, in anticipation of the completion of the third episode of Midnight Fugue, I never released the second one. Needless to say, the third episode fell through (due to technical problems with the battery and power supply) and so episode two was never released.

If you’re thinking at this point that it sounds like The TTT is struggling to get even the most basic, simple production done and still failing, you would be right. I hesitate to compare it to the death throes of an animal, but in a sense, that’s what was happening. Everything from Mincemeat! on was almost entirely my doing. Dave helped when he could and Aaron helped out with acting, but I was writing, organizing, funding, directing, shooting, composing music for, and editing these last few projects myself. Between that and work and college, even the simplest minute was a hurdle. We were still coasting, I believe, with momentum left over from From Beyond, but we were just about out of steam.

It was Mincemeat!, PSA, Midnight Fugue, and then Trademark, all within three months of each other. The very last project, Trademark, was a thirty second entry for an AdBusters contest. I saw the contest was open about two weeks before the deadline and thought it would be cool to shoot something, but didn’t have any ideas. I was working on something else when I read a line about Windows® something-or-other (with the little registered symbol), and the idea fell into my head, fully formed. I wrote the thirty second script, and got Dave on board. We shot it about two days before the deadline. I cut it that night, and there it was. I liked the gag, but some people couldn’t follow it. (The ones who could seemed to like it, though, for what it’s worth.) I never heard back about the contest—and even checking their website a few weeks later I could find no mention of it. I believe it may have been cancelled due to lack of entries, but I’m not sure. In any case, I didn’t think that short 30 second spot would be the last thing we did.

We had come full circle. The TTT started with a 30 second short directed by me, using only myself and Dave, involving an esoteric joke that only a few people got. Seven years later, we ended with a 30 second short directed by me, using only myself and Dave, involving an esoteric joke that only a few people got.

Freedom To Live

I don’t know that I would have wanted The TTT to end that way, had I the ability to foresee our fate. Lacking this, however, I wouldn’t have wanted it to play out any other way. From Beyond will always stand as the greatest thing I ever did in high school, but the productions that came after, few as there were, are nothing to scoff at. I’ve found over the years that they are much more approachable, and people who see them will often spread the word.

Between the last TTT sketch and present day, I’ve worked in a number of different professional and independent video capacities. I wrote three paragraphs detailing the work that I did in the past two years, but I went back and deleted it. It wasn’t The TTT. Suffice it to say that even though The TTT drifted apart, I haven’t stopped doing what we were doing. Maybe one day I’ll set down the camera, but it hasn’t come yet. It’s not even on the horizon.

For that matter, I’m not even sure how gone The TTT really is. In talking with friends, the interest remains, but everything has gotten bigger. Real life is increasingly important. The productions are more complex. It seems strange to me now to do a shoot without lights or a mic, never mind that we never had them before. The ideas I have are bigger, higher concept. Geographically, we’re further apart.

So I can’t say Trademark is the final project for The TTT. It might be. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to declare that, absolutely, that The TTT is over. I’ve still got a camera. So while I might close by leaving The TTT’s future undefined, I don’t close the script. It’s still being written. And as long as the script is still being written, someone in The TTT will still be shooting it.

It is the monomyth. We lived it. And now we’re about to step through the portal, again.

This is Ted from The TTT, signing off.