Happi Devil

While I was assembling the first cut of our little short, I thought it would be fun to run an alternate version that included a bit of our bloopers and behind the scenes conversations.

Most of it was alternate angles, which would prove to come in handy at a later date. But we did get the occasional arm in the shot, or somebody on camera squirting blood up as “The Wife” delivered her death blows. Simple stuff that we would have worked out if we had understood what “blocking” or “rehearsals” were…

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… and then I went sideways. While I had my low-tech editing bay set up, I saw that I could run audio though from broadcast television over the audio of the assembled short.

So, as a bit of fun, I hit record and just began flipping channels to random stations, and since the picture feed was our “Chopsticks” short, I could only hear what was being broadcast. I dubbed this edit the “Lynchian” edit because of its randomness.

The funny[?] thing about this edit is how some of the audio perfectly synced with the image or even subject matter. Between catching Sally Jessy Raphael’s show on spousal abuse, to the music breakdown of En Vogue, it was legitimately all random. Synchronicity in action. Its also a great time capsule of Southern California afternoon television… moar Muppet Babies!

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It started a bit randomly in Economics class. I don’t fully remember how the conversation started, but three of us decided that we were going to make an short art film, because… why not.

The story was simple, a suppressed and abused woman is pushed beyond her breaking point. She defiantly reclaims her heritage and independence by killing her abusive husband with a pair of chopsticks.

We didn’t have a proper script, but we did write out a two page treatment that walked through the concepts of the story we were trying to tell. Though reading through it now, I’m a little bummed at some of the details that we didn’t get to film, like “The Wife” character was meant to be wearing a blonde wig, representing another layer of the suppression of her identity. Unfortunately, since we were in high school nobody had any money to buy a wig.

We filmed the short over two afternoons in my parents kitchen using two Hi-8 cameras. After filming was done, I jerry rigged two VCRs together to make a rudimentary editing bay, and even spliced two cables together so that I could route my stereo into one of them to create the soundtrack. It’s funny to think that today literally all of this could be done on the phone that’s in my pocket.

Sure, some of the cuts could be tightened up, or we could have done with some cutaways or even a bit of lighting design, but all in all, I still think that we created something that had some merit. Of course its no where near perfect, but considering none of us had studied film, I would say its “not terrible… ”

Let me know what you think… oh and I totally have some more thoughts on the subject… stay tuned…