The inspiration for this piece was the movie "Fantastic Voyage" and also Jacques Cousteau TV specials. I imagine a small "submarine" travelling through Mark's apartment like it was an alien underwater cave and all you cou…
The inspiration for this piece was the movie "Fantastic Voyage" and also Jacques Cousteau TV specials. I imagine a small "submarine" travelling through Mark's apartment like it was an alien underwater cave and all you could see was the surface textures and they had no real meaning. I wanted to create a spookey underwater effect with totally ordinary household objects.
When I moved to Los Angeles, my college friend Mark let me stay at his apartment for several months (because his girlfriend has previously moved out and I needed somewhere to stay). At the time, Mark worked for Hughes as a Technical Writer.
I got involved with Simmons Cable in Long Beach, so I could make video, and we shot this video one weekend. It took ALL weekend from Friday to Sunday night and Mark had an attack of the Gout, so he just sat on the couch and watched.
This is all his stuff that you see, so he got credit for set construction. He wasn't too annoyed at the inconvenience and I listened to him complain about his Gout all weekend, so he also gets a credit for camera assist.
The most difficult part of the video was getting the camera to move in a smooth tracking shot. Eventually, I used a coffee table top (with the legs removed) and placed the camera on a fluffy Towel and slowly dragged it along the table top past the object being videotaped.
David New helped me record the audio track in his home studio. He made the sounds and was recording engineer. I had a stop watch to time the sequences to the same length and he seemed to think that was "pretty organized." I love the way the audio turned out. David is a real natural sound artist.
The project was shot on 3/4 U-Matic and transferred to Quicktime movie by Brent Backhus at Real Time Copies, in Culver City, CA He does fantastic work (As you can see) and he can help you with your audio and video restoration and duplication needs in just as a professional manner.
video copyright 1986 Wm Schaeffer
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Today 10-16-2014 David tells me that the Synthesizer we used for the sound construction was a Kawai SX-240.
Recorded to a Sony 854-4 Reel-to-Reel four track recorder.
