Gardage

A classic. One evening, back in high school, Brian Morgan had an idea, and I had a borrowed video camera. Corey and I followed him and acted/shot his scenes for him. Before we could finish, the rain came down and put our 2 dollar production to a halt. That night I cut the footage together and thew some funny looking credits. Although only the opening of the story was even shot, on some bizarre aesthetic level it worked.

Gardage was always a special video for me because surprisingly or unsurprisingly, everybody seemed to have a very strong and unique interpretation for it. I was always interested in what people had to say about it because frankly, beyond and the pure aesthetic appeal, it has no objective meaning or purpose. It was such a small file size that it was very easily shared through e-mail or msn conversation, which let to a lot of people seeing it, and a wide variety of reactions.

Hell, for all I know everybody's been humoring me and it's just a worthless pile. Either way, I was inspired one night and re-worked the video. Digitized footage from the original tapes, cut it virtually exactly as the old one was, did come colour correction and went overboard by key framing the modulation on gamma adjust for a shot that had a painful display of auto-exposure. I completely redesigned the sound. One of the charms of the original Gardage was the looping, slowed-down 2 second clip of suburban ambiance that seemed to say "womp womp, womp womp". I replaced this with a cleaner recording that was recorded... elsewhere. 'Thew in some foley, and I had a completely re-mastered classic.

I wonder if the new audio removed some of the cheap charm. Also, the colour correction I did was for a CRT monitor, not a computer monitor, so in the next week or so I might re-do that and re-upload it. For now though, here's GARDAGE.





Also, if you haven't heard of or seen it, take the time to check out Zeitgeist. It's constructed really well and the concepts not only brought up in the film, but the concepts that the filmmakers themselves are pushing are really worthwhile.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/