Happi Devil

A few months ago, when I stumbled on these old tapes while we were packing up our house for a move, I thought it would be nice to get them digitized. I wasn’t planning on doing anything more with them, other than breaking up the three versions into their own clips and putting them all on YouTube to share with those who helped produce them.

Maybe it was the “shelter in place” of the pandemic and the desire to shift my focus off the news for minute, or maybe it was Nine Inch Nails surprise release of two new albums in their moody soundscape “Ghosts” series. really though, why not both?

Either way, I started to mull on it and thought, “why not.” I went back and reviewed the footage. The source tapes were long gone, meaning all I had to work with was the original three edits. Luckily, in “Edit 2,” I used bunch of alternate angles from the second camera. Reaffirming my thought that this was just meant to happen. So with proper editing software and an actual degree in film production, I assembled the definitive remaster…

Naturally there are a lot of things that I wish we would have done better at the time… but hey… all things considered… I think we did pretty good… thanks for taking this little journey back with me, and let me know what you think in comments below.

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!