Story: It's interesting having old notes like this to look through. This little Andy Warhol notebook is filled with pages of rough ideas and shot descriptions that I wanted to capture in my rush to complete my submission for the NFB/Citizenshift Make Shorts, Not War Contest. After writing a poem to serve as the structure for my short, I scribbled out a rough shot and edit list of the symbols I wanted to create. The focus of the contest was about Canadian soldiers in WWI and recognizing their sacrifice in regards to peace - using (in part) historic clips from the National Film Board of Canada to put the film in context. I wrote about contrasting the decaying bark of a tree with the ruins of cities, leaves representing dead soldiers on the ground, the symbolism in the changing seasons as a reflection on the generations that followed, etc. Looking through these old notes remind me of just how anxious and motivated I was for those few days in late January. You can read about the full story and how the contest went by clicking the link above.
What can I say about a project that came together largely by chance? Early in the fall semester of 2006 I was taking an experimental production class. One of the first assignments we received was to create a found footage project using the old video edit suite at the university. Right away I was convinced that I was going to do this project using my own equipment, because scheduling and planning around the university was continually a hassle - however, and mostly because my friend Tyler and I had discussed editing our projects at the same time, I ended up working at the school.
Not every project can be a masterpiece. This was the idea I had in my mind prior to pulling my project together. I had no VHS tapes to work with, I was completely willing to pull something together using the old tapes in the suite - a true experiment/found footage project if you will.
That night Tyler and I were hanging out in the suite and Tyler was the first to edit his project - which you can see here. He seemed to have a rough idea of what he wanted, but I'm sure he was winging it too. When he finished it was probably around 9 or 10pm, which strangely enough is what I consider to be the best time to work at school. I have a number of memories surrounding late night projects and wandering the hallways in the middle of the night - I also lived at the dorms so part of the wandering was about finding my way home sometimes, haha. Anyway, the point is that the editing became a mix of running for slurpees, watching old Weird Al clips, and catching up with Tyler - who at this point wasn't much more than a familiar face from first year.
Tyler had a copy of The Time Machine, Death to Smoochie and Back to the Future which became the basic elements of my edit. The dread of doing the assignment turned into the excitement of things falling into place. I genuinely had a lot of fun pulling random clips, working on the old VHS equipment, and dubbing audio from old tapes. The whole time machine element seems kind of funny now because this was all before my Buick to the Future series was even a consideration.
While The Other Time Machine is a flawed video, it's always made me laugh. Despite being crude both in content and construction, it was the inspiration behind a lot of other experiments that followed. The most notable being Space Drama in 2008, which was a much more intensive, personally motivated editing exercise. The Other Time Machine is significant mostly for the history and time it marks in my film school career, but I won't make too many promises. Some people love this, some people hate this - it's a lesson directly from Film 100 (or technically Film 400 something). Enjoy!
The Other Time Machine (2006) Found Footage Edit by Luke Fandrich
I think it's funny that this is the second time I've posted a remix video that someone has cut from Disney's Mary Poppins. The first was Scary Mary, the footage cut into a convincing horror movie trailer. This one is perhaps even more brilliant. From what little I know about POGO (or Nick Bertke on YouTube) he seems to get a kick out of remixing popular video content. He has a mix from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one from Alice in Wonderland, and there's several others. This one, Expialidocious is by far his most inspired and catchy work in my opinion. I had to go out of my way to find a ripped mp3 so that I could put it on my iPod. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.
