Head Tale

I digitized this from a VHS tape awhile back but don’t think I ever posted it (and when you watch it, you’ll see why!)

One of the many highlights of my 1995 semester exchange to York England while in undergrad was taking a Film Production class (which happened to be taught by a guy who worked on The Muppets – how cool is that?)

How the class worked was we all had to write a treatment for a short 5-7 minute film then the class voted on which ones to do and of the five or so selected, you could pick which one you wanted to work on.

Not surprisingly, I wrote a proposal for a film that would be a documentary exploring the rich culture and history of York’s pubs via a pub crawl. Also not surprisingly, my proposal didn’t make the cut. 😉

The treatment I ended up deciding to work on was called “Henry Cragg’s Wonder People”.

The clip below was a part of a larger series of vignettes which was supposed to be a sketch comedy show in the vein of Monty Python. We had a couple other segments – two pregnant women getting high and listening to the Beatles while philosophizing, two farmers in a pub (in a pub and I didn’t even get to work on that clip as an actor or a tech!) rambling back and forth and finally, a madcap monologue by an eccentric housewife (played by the woman whose proposal it was and easily the funniest, best acted, most professional of all the different segments.)

Our films were supposed to be 5-7 minutes but ours came out at 20 minutes.  In my self-assessment for the professor, I admitted we’d blown away the guideline but that I was also really impressed that we’d basically produced a full-length television program.

My acting was pretty bad (okay, really bad.  Okay, Nicolas Cage bad!) but, ever the techie, I loved going in the editing room and playing around with sound, graphics and other effects.  It’s not in the clip but I was particularly proud of creating an End Credits sequence with music, everybody’s names and roles they played and billed as a “Universe City” production (say it fast!) since this was very rudimentary technology compared to today when people are creating feature films on their MacBooks in their living rooms.

Anyhow, I should write more about my England exchange sometime.  Don’t tell Shea I said this but I think of it as the single best uninterrupted four month stretch of my entire life.  I was flush with class after a sweet summer job, I was in my fourth year of undergrad but taking classes that were 100-level introductory classes (which would still count for full credit back home), and I learned all kinds of new and interesting things…including what “flares” were! 😉