Monday, August 26, 2013

Stuffing the Passer - Season 5 Premiere

This episode is not a "movie". It's not "about" Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like, it's crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam.

"Should we roll around in it, just once?" irishoutsider asked, nervously eyeing the the pile containing $970 worth of nickels. We still hadn't found out why PayPal had disbursed the proceeds of our crowdsourced fundraiser in such a peculiar denomination.

"Inadvisable. We can't let this go to our heads. Also, I read somewhere that one in five nickels in circulation has traces of the herpes virus."

"I assume that's untrue."

We were in a poorly-ventilated conference room. There were too many puppets. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. Little by little, we went insane.

"The memory card is full again," irishoutsider stammered. I had puppets on each of my hands and a chroma-key green mask pulled over my face. He could still see the wild rage in in my eyes. He knew he should not have interrupted me.

"Put it with the rest," I hissed through gritted teeth.

He turned and looked at the mountain of memory cards - gigabytes upon terabytes upon petabytes of puppet footage. We had thrown out all of our food to use the pantry for storage. We were starving. Some of the footage was once-in-a-lifetime performances of heart-rending pathos. Some of it was the 16 hours I spent howling like a wolf. Christ only knows what was what -- we never labeled any of them.

The first print of this episode was 4 days long. We couldn't print it to DVD, so I just mailed our mainframe server to the producers. The next several re-edits trimmed out most of the interpretive dancing and all of the Norse mythology. When I finally got the episode down to 13 and a half minutes, I garroted the guard the studio had posted outside my door and escaped into the moonless night, naked as the day I was born because how the hell else do you work with Final Cut Pro X?

I found a WiFi signal in that swampy bog and uploaded our beloved monstrosity. It belongs to the ages now. Enjoy.