Journal Entries

Oct 16, 2007

Knowing when to back away.

Am I a horrible person for finding this funny? Probably…

People Getting Punched Just Before Eating via Daring Fireball

But in classic SNL fashion the skit goes widely off the rails in the last 20 seconds. That’s what makes SNL unwatchable nowadays.

In college, I was assigned a 5 minute video project. It was supposed to be an audio intensive creation where 80% of the time was solely devoted to sound while the screen was blank. My take on the project to gather used audio samples from a ridiculous amount of sources and mix them out of context so they seemed to be talking to each other. Ever heard Crow from MST3K comment on a mid-western, mega church preacher who debates the merits of cotton candy with John McClane? I have. It’s hilarious. More accurately, it was an exercise in re-contextualization. But I got so caught up in re-sequencing dialog tracks that I didn’t pay attention to the message I was crafting. When I hit the five minute mark, I just stopped.

At the critique, my professor simply said, “It seems like you couldn’t figure out when to stop.” He was right. I had so fixated on filling the 5 minutes that I ignored that I only had a little more than three minutes’ worth of material.

When the zombies appear in the SNL clip, it’s obvious that they are just filling out the time they have.

The hardest thing about creativity is knowing when to back away and declare it done.

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