C & C MOVIE FACTORY

I recently borrowed my families old video 8 camera so Natsuko and I could take a look at our wedding video. Once I hooked the camera up to our computer and realized how easy it was to import (thank you apple), I decided to troll through more tapes to see what I could find. I have a box full of video 8 tapes that we haven't looked at in over 11 years.

One of the tapes was labeled Colin and Cameron. I had struck gold. Between 1993-1995, my friend Cameron and I made short movies for fun. Cameron and I were big fans of the Coen Brothers and Tarantino, so most of our films were lame versions of something they had done before. The internet was still in it's earliest form back then, so in order to show our films we had to put them on vhs tapes and pass them around.

We had no way of editing the movies, so we would try to film everything in order. If we had to edit something out later, we could only do it by selectively not recording a section to vhs.

Did I mention that Cameron and I were also total losers ? We were. We almost never appeared on screen together, because we had to pass the camera back and forth to record. And if we wanted a female character in our films, then one of us had to put a dress on. No girls would hang out with us ! We were losers ! Even our girlfriends at the time wouldn't be part of the movies.

After a few people saw our films at school, they wanted to be a part of them. Unfortunately that's when we found out the hard way that the more people you have to direct... the more difficult it becomes to create a film that makes sense. Everyone wanted to put their own idea into the films, and Cameron and I were way too agreeable. It all fell apart.

I've put a bunch of these short films up on flickr.com, and you can check them out HERE.

Below is one of my favorites titled THE TELEPHONE.



your pal,
Beadle