Monday, June 9, 2014

RIP Rik Mayall

Parc de l'espoir

My new short documentary about the AIDS memorial park here in the Gay Village MontrĂ©al. Yes, it's in french, watch it anyway! It's only a few minutes long and Moby was kind enough to lend the music  for the project. The narration might still be changed to another voice, but we'll see. It took me 9 months to get this far.

Edit: my conjoint did the final narration and i tightened it up a little. It is supposed to be played before each film shown in a little festival in the park itself this summer now. The version that will be shown most likely in august has a better balanced sound track as well.


Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Get out! GET OUT!

Working in the video store was always a challenge at both ends of the day. If you came in three hours early to get work done, you had to hide so no one could see you were in the store because even hours before opening, people would be dropping by thinking they could get inside and rent films. The other end of the day involved getting people to leave the store. I don't know why people who likely leave their own jobs as soon as humanly possible think that at ten pm am entire staff of video workers doesn't want to get home at least as badly as they do. 

To get rid of hangers in who thought they had a god given right to keep us work as long as they wanted for a 1.99$ rental, we came up with some techniques to not so subtly get them the hell out.     

We did the typical retail tricks like vacuuming the floors and shutting down the lights but those things don't deter many. Finally we decided to use the thing they came for against them. Videos. 

We would put selected videos on and time them to be at a certain point ten minutes before the store closed. "The miracle of plastic surgery" would be at the clip where the woman's face is lifted off like an orange peel, "reanimator" has a scene at the where a body puts its decapitated head between the legs of a college girl for oral sex purposes. The customers would look at the multiple screens not believing it would happen, but when it did, they ran out screaming. 


But the one thing no one was immune to and cleared out everyone without exception was 70s ABBA videos.