One of my favorite singers is a six-foot-five Scottish gent by the name of Fish. He used to front another band many years ago, but I won’t drop their name here. Not because I don’t like them, ’cause I do, but because I imagine he must sometimes get tired of every public mention of him pointing out his past career. His solo career stands well enough on his own, I think. At any rate, besides singing, Fish has branched out into acting now and then. He auditioned for a role in Gladiator (the part of the huge German gladiator, I believe), but alas he didn’t get the role. Or maybe it was offerred, but he had a scheduling conflict. I can’t remember. Anyhow, since then he nabbed a role as a mental patient in the Adrien Brody film, The Jacket. It was a brief role, just one scene, but just the fact that Fish was in it (most of his acting gigs have been for British TV shows / specials) clearly meant I had to make a Jacket vid using a song by Fish.

Choosing a song was pretty easy. I needed something eerie with a paranoid-ish vibe and moments of sudden weirdness. Yup, that would “Clock Moves Sideways,” no doubt. (Actually, he’s got another song that fits that bill, but I already have plans for it.) The song is over seven minutes long, though, much of it being a somewhat long audio clip from a Fellini interview (I believe) followed by a lot of chorus. So, I found what I think would be a good place to end a “radio” edit and chopped off the rest. Ended up being about half the original’s length. Wow!

So, yeah. If you want to know which character is played by Fish, there are two bald men during the group therapy segment, one of which looks rather small, weak, and spaced out. Fish is the other one.

Watch Clocket.

Visit Fish’s official website.
“Clock Moves Sideways” is from his 2001 CD, Fellini Days.
And finally, a plug for the video source, The Jacket.

(Yes, those last two lead you to Amazon, which will pay me if you use my links to buy stuff. Please use my links to buy stuff so they will pay me. PLEASE!!)

Update Nov 17 2006: Amazon doesn’t appear to have Fellini Days in stock any longer except through third-party sellers. Might want to check your local used CD retailer.

Ah. A challenge.

So it was. I set up a timeline in Sony Vegas with the music and words that have inspired revolutionaries and comedic writers alike for decades. I marked key points — baselines, time signature changes, the entry points of new instruments and vocals. I thought about the story I would tell and which direction to take with it — a dramatic look at one man’s struggles in a world engulfed in madness…or a parody aimed to tickle the funnybone. I hope it’s clear which route I chose, for I have much to learn about editing if the final work is interpreted as the other.

Then I began the task of carefully looking through the footage to tell my story. As I said, it’s a long film. Really long. I-can’t-believe-they-found-more-material-for-the-DVD long. A difficult task to find just the right actions, expressions, and scenery, but as I said…a challenge. One I was up for, as was our hero. I considered the risks, weighed the stakes, and knew there was only one conceiveable course of action. Accept the challenge, stand up to the oppressors, and do the right thing. Because that’s what he would do.

If you think me melodramatic for talking this way about a simple fanvid, let me paraphrase the words that inspired me to create it, and then see how you feel.

“Gandalf’s one bad mother–

Shut your mouth!

But I’m talkin’ about Gandalf.”

Can you dig it?

2000: After the success of the film clerks and its follow-ups, Smith creates a cartoon series based on the two leads of the film, Dante and Randal. ABC picks up the series and airs…two episodes. Those and the four unaired episodes are later released in a collection called Clerks Uncensored.

2005: As my first attempt at making a fanvid, I decide that the Clerks cartoon should be paired with Talking Head’s “Once in a Lifetime.” Why? Because at one point in the show, bored as usual with his convience store job, Dante sighs, “Same as it ever was.” A vid was born.

Unfortunately, after I finished the vid, I discovered horrible flickering / stuttering in the final render. I’d been working with MPEG files for the source, so I converted them all to AVI for smoother editing and got the same result. I knew it had to be an interlacing issue, but no matter what I did — even converting the clips to progressive scan — nothing seemed to help. So, I shelved the project and gave up on vidding altogether.

Just kidding.

After finishing another vid, Light into Darko, I decided to re-open the Clerks vid and see what I could do. Eventually, I ended up going through each source clip, exporting them to image sequences, checking each and every frame in Paint Shop Pro, and cleaning up the in-between frames that were causing the stuttering. Not the easiest solution, I’m sure, but first one I could think of that actually worked. Anyhow, now in 2006 it’s done. I’m hoping that, should I try editing using an animated source, it won’t have these same issues. If so…anyone know an easier fix?

At any rate, here’s Clerktime. Enjoy.

Shameless plug and promotion:

Buy the Clerks cartoon and The Best Of Talking Heads.

As for the video: For a while now, Porcupine Tree’s “Collapse the Light into Earth” has sounded, to me, like it would sound good over the credits for Donnie Darko. Not that there’s anything wrong with the current credits theme, but nonetheless the song somehow fit the mood of the film. I especially liked the idea of juxtaposing the chorus with the image of the jet engine falling through Donnie’s room. (My thinking was not meant in a morbid way, I assure you.) At any rate, I kept this in mind over a period of months, but couldn’t quite determine how to go about piecing together a vid.

One day, I rented the film Millions (sorry to plug another movie in a vid post, but you’ll see why). Among the extras was something I’d never seen on a DVD before — it was a promo / trailer / demo which was labeled on the menu as a “DVD cutdown.” Essentially, it’s a series of clips from the movie put to music. The kicker, for me anyhow, was that they were in sequential order. In essence, it was a summary in about four minutes. (If anyone knows of any other DVDs with a feature like this, let me know. I’d like to see how more of these are done.) That, at least, planted an idea in my head, and I acted on the idea about a month later.

So… Done in “DVD cutdown” format, Light into Darko covers most of the movie start to finish, though it concentrates mostly on Donnie’s relationship with Gretchen as well as his discovery of the events that have destined it to end almost as soon as it began. Frank makes a couple cameos, but while he is a guiding force in events, he’s obviously not in the forefront for this particular vid. Maybe another time, Frank.

Collapse the Light into Earth is by Porcupine Tree. You will find it on their album In Absentia. One of my favorite bands on the planet. Note that the quiet and serenity of this particular song is not standard operating procedure for them, though they do usually include one or two slow songs. As a whole, though, Porcupine Tree rocks pretty hard. And it’s good stuff, so give ‘em a listen.

Donnie Darko is one of those movies that most will either love or hate, in part because (at least in its original form), it’s so complex that very few people know exactly what’s going during their first viewing. There’s enough there to enjoy the film, I feel, and the background that you get by reading the film’s website, the DVD extras, and other fan-driven resources is icing on the cake. In 2004, a re-cut version of the film was released, one which adds in material to help you get the big picture more clearly. If you’d rather scratch your head after watching the film, as I did the first time, try the theatrical cut instead.

Watch Light into Darko.