April 09, 2008

• I've been actually trying to figure out how this guy did this back in 1970, since I first saw it, which was some time back, & reminded by its present doing the blog rounds. I think he's basically recorded the audio separately. There's no audio track on that old super8 film, unless that's not what he's used, so he would have to. The dialogue at the beginning is clearly dubbed. How he has then segued the film & audio together finally is beyond me; no SMPTE in use for such a primitive set up, one presumes. He perhaps did this by eye & ear, when creating the final master. How he's done the split screen effects must have been rather complicated, because I assume he's put a matte on the aperture to only expose one part of the film, then go back and refilm it, having moved the matte, to shoot the next little part. This is very ancient tech, and unless he had access to some more sophisticated set up, he's spent an inordinate amount of time on it. Notably, he's by no means a bad musician. He would have to have planned out every shot & angle pretty precisely prior to beginning, which is beyond people like me who have the attention span of a gnat.
• The clue is the bit with him playing with the metronome. He would have used a multiple masked screen for each "player", and synced them with the ticks. We tend to assume it's so easy these days with digital recording, but that whole sequence would have required considerable patience.
• Yeah I suppose y'all think it was pretty stupid of me not to recognise that. Well, it was.
• I just think it's happy! Happy happy!
• I loved that short. I felt embarassed how the slow pace of the piece makes one, corrupted by cut-and-flash modern media style, slightly annoyed at the beginning. But when he begins to play... Wonderful work. I'd love to travel back in time a present Sid with a powerbook and a camcorder and see what he'd do with them.