Monday 7 June 2010

Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong...

Our Editor Writes:


So, yes, by now you've probably realised that we sent our director to Film School.

I say 'probably realised', of course, as if there's anyone reading this. If there is, of course; hello! Thanks for stopping by. Pull up a chair and get comfortable, there's about forty or so plus entries to go through related to our slightly odd - charitably, 'idiosyncratic' - film company.


But I thought it a good idea to note that our director - such as he is - is, in fact, right. It's cheaper to pay his tuition fees than to hire him a camera and editing suite. Bear in mind that here in the Eton Crow offices we have two macs, one with final cut (express) and one with - Oh Lord - iMovie, and one or two consumer / low grade camcorders.


You can think of us as charmingly retro, or you can think of us as lo-fi, but in reality, we're cheap and we're proud. Well, I say proud. Kind of proud. The kind of proud that you can only really have when you don't have any other options.

But here's the thing. We have a sponsor. Not in the televangelical sense - but we have someone sufficiently interested in our Director to sponsor him while he does the learning thing and posting strange little blog entries with musical lyrics for post titles about being An Old Man Among Young People. This sponsor - hell, it's always going to be italicised - seems to believe that our Director has some potential of some sort, which is nice.

So here's a little secret. Right now, Eton Crow - as you've no doubt worked out, you smart cookie - isn't exactly a 'film company'. It's me and the director, and hey, I have a day job, so... I get to spend the occasional bit of time - evenings and weekends - reviewing the director's tapes. Don't get me wrong, he has to edit them himself 99% of the time, because, hey, he's being graded on them, but shit, even if Eton Crow is Me and Him and Him and Me (and we are all together), I do like to keep my hand in.

We do actually have stuff to show you, in case you were wondering if we're just an odd bunch of people talking about studying and filmmaking. So I figure it's time to show our working. Here's an example, in three parts;










The band are called Kamikaze Practice, as you can probably tell. This is only a part of why they're interesting, though. See, our director loves William Gibson (hell, let's test this Amazon Associates thing out; books like Pattern Recognition and Spook Country lay around our office whether I like it or not).

So the thing about Kamikaze Practice is that - according to our reputable sources, at least - they no longer exist. They glimmered brightly as a band since sometime towards the autumn of last year, played a few gigs, recorded a few songs, played the gig you see above and then broke up due to (a) musical differences and (b) one of their number apparently having other commitments, which we won't mention here.

This might explain why we never heard back from the band's singer about the videos that were edited and uploaded over the course of a month. (Well, the uploading took a week, primarily because our office broadband is capped at something like 2mb on a good fucking day, so that was a fun wait).

In Gibson terms, releasing a video of a band that's already broken up and reformed as someone else by the time the video was edited is, well, it's up there. W-a-y up high.

So while it's annoying that the video doesn't have the same meaning as, say, a video of a new band on to big things, it's still, to his mind, pretty cool.

To me, it's annoying. But I'm just the editor - i.e. the one who keeps the computers happy - so what would I know?

The director, by the way, is on a short holiday at the moment, but hey, he never reads any of the entries he posts anyway, so he probably won't even notice this one...

... But enjoy the videos. And if you like them, bear in mind that this may be the only exigent proof that the band in them ever existed...

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