Pissing off my film teacher with WORDSMITHS
In the process of sorting all the possessions I've accumulated into "worthy of shipping fees" or "donation/trash," I ran across some beat up MiniDV tapes. Because I work for a TV show that still occasionally uses tape decks, I brought them into work to check them out. One of them was the raw footage for a short I made at NYU.
My assignment was to make a 3-minute MOS (silent) film set to music so we could practiced non-linear editing, shot composition, using the camera - the basic basic basic stuff. I was required to take the class because I was in Screenwriting and the school thought it was important for the screenwriters to have some idea of how a film was made. What they weren't counting on was my past of making home movies and using very early non-linear editing systems while working for my School District in high school. We were given the camera for 2 days and a tape (no microphone equipment, since it was supposed to be silent) and two weeks to put our project together.
I turned in a 20-minute improvised mockumentary about a young guy living in Hoboken making crossword puzzles and his roommate, a christian freestyle rapper/freelance bus boy. Ryan, Nate and myself got drunk and improvised the whole thing in one evening.
My teacher called me on my cell phone the day she watched it and told me that while she was entertained, I was "not special" and since I "obviously have a grasp on the process" I had 2 days to turn in a project that followed the assignment or I'd get an F. I turned in some bullshit about me making coffee in the morning.
I lost that cut I turned in, so I'm happily combing through all the raw footage and re-cutting it. I don't know how we did it, because we were intoxicated at the time (and there's some girl laughing in the outtakes, I do NOT remember who that was), but it's a very subtle comedy about sad narcissism.
The above is a quick teaser I put together mostly to show those two guys - ten years later they both look VASTLY different - but it's actually pulled from footage that will be in the short.
A lot of the stuff we shot to establish the relationship between these two characters also turned out great but doesn't really have a place in the narrative. It made it into my NYU cut just as extended F.U.s to the 3-minute time limit (the scenes all have a lot of dead air, like the interviews, the pace is slower).
Anyway, the scenes I'm not using in the cut I massaged into two lesser teasers. They're below. They're not in the short. I don't know when I'll finish it, I do have TONS of better things to be doing.