Monday, May 2, 2011

FOUND!

Yes Men was a great film to watch to prepare to undertake my found footage project. I have so much respect for activist that aren't content doing the same old, tired approach to getting stuff done. Who really gives a shit about petitions? and pamphlets? nobody. There approach to making these corporations accountable by impersonating them is just the type of innovative ideas that most movements are lacking. It was very inspiring and it seemed that it wasn't really all that hard to do. They did have some generous funders and a lot of experience with website development/costume design/ and other helpful skills, but really just the concepts can carry a lot of the weight. They presented the world with a false image (or honest image) of a corporation to try and expose the truth that is usually hidden away.


For my found footage project, I tried to incorporate the idea of presenting something that could be taken as actual, but putting my own spin on it to throw in all sorts of fun messages. I used an video from the early 60s entitled Boys Beware which is about how homosexual deviants are abducting boys around the country. The film opens with the scenario of fictitious "Jimmy Barnes"-the title of my own spin- who gets in a car with a pedophile and is eventually molested. The film is filled with inaccuracies and offensive rhetoric. I decided that I would craft a similar scene, but instead of the pedophile being the bad guy, I wanted to make Jimmy seem like the freaky one in the situation. I only used footage and audio from the original video. I remixed some of the audio (which is voice over narration) to make Jimmy look like he was interested in having a good time, or otherwise just simply didn't care what happened to himself. For example, in the original it says something like "Ralph showed Jimmy some pornographic images, but Jimmy knew he shouldn't look." I added in some audio in the film saying how Jimmy hitchhiked 100s of times before and was not afraid to again. The result was "Ralph showed Jimmy some pornographic images, Jimmy knew he shouldn't look, but well he'd done it a 100 times before." This was actually a lot of fun to do, and I think I may tinker around in found footage (especially offensive 50s and 60s instructional gems) for quite a while longer.

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