r&t&v / smell the roses
While in grad school I had a brief flirtation with machinima. In contrast to the difficulties of shooting on film (Actors! Lighting! Equipment!), machinima became a powerful tool to express myself quickly, easily and cheaply. Don't get me wrong, I liked shooting on film! But Source Film Maker came to feel like a cheat code, a way to get ideas to the screen in record time.
These films came as a pair, made in the same month. I was doing a lot of growing as a person. I was about to turn 30, was moving in with the woman who would become my wife and finding my passion as a creator. Smell the Roses is the most about that, about finding out things about yourself that you'd rather not know (I think a lot about that Dismemberment Plan lyric, "knowing about that would involve knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous, and absolutely true things about myself that I'd rather not admit to right now") and then facing up to them, trying to grow from them. Shadows, an on-the-head allusion to Plato, show up, but so does light. Acknowledge the light, find the shadow. r&t&v has voice over from David Foster Wallace and Neil Postman and is about my very favorite thing: Is technology good for us? It can feel like a weird question for someone who works in technology to ask. But a big part of the reason I got into computers was to make them work for me, to master what felt like magic and make it mundane. More and more that relationship has become inverted. Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 and the ideas about culture, entertainment and what it means to be a person who uses technology, any technology. |
TEAMI dang did the whole thing
Scott Stephan Music credits in the video! Made with Source Film Maker & TF2 assets |
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