a lo-fi, experimental, just-for-fun project
electroacoustic soundtrack by Elizabeth Knudson
experimental video by Derek Warren
and featuring
a picture of Clint Enns' head
Requires QuickTime 6, like a lot of nifty high-quality media fun does
Date: January 2004.
Debuted at the Western Front's Raw & Cooked Cabaret, February 29th, 2004
Much to my surprise, this video garnered a good four or five laughs at its debut, which is approximately four or five more than I was expecting.
Elizabeth originally wrote the soundtrack as a Directed Study in electroacoustic music with Barry Truax. After seeing CookieCam, Elizabeth approached me to create some video to go with her piece. I honestly had no idea how I was going to fill up 11 minutes worth of video on anything, let alone video that focused just on vegetables. I'd been curious about stop-motion/time-lapse animation and video since I was little, so I started there.
The celery title sequence took six takes to perfect. At first, my celery bits didn't look good at all; the second staging was too wide; the third staging was too narrow and thus illegible; the fourth round had a backwards letter (oops); and the phone rang during the fifth round and so I started over. Did I mention that I don't consider myself to be a very visually-oriented person? Well, I don't.
We've had this particular cutting board for ten years.
Elizabeth is playing the saxophone.
The pot of soup at the beginning and ending of the movie is a pot of Elizabeth's onion soup.
During the eggplant scene, the original idea was to show eggplants draining... that is, until Elizabeth and I realized that it's hard stuff to get eggplant to drip. It was getting late and we were out of ideas, so we just filmed us dumping water onto the eggplant. That's draining, right? Right?
Clint (the ranting chef, also the head that appears halfway through the action) was supposed to be in town so that we could tape him and have a live subject for more interesting footage. He was quite sick, however, so Elizabeth picked a rather awkward photo of him and I cropped off the rest of his body and animated his head. (Like I said, eleven minutes is a lot of video to create purely about vegetables and I was short of other ideas.)
Halfway through the movie, when I see the beans forming swarming around the mushroom group, I'm always reminded of the BC Children's Hospital logo.
About the scenes of Elizabeth and I dumping pepper into what looks like tomato paste: we had no idea exactly what it was we were supposed to be cooking, but whatever it was, it ended up being very peppery and disgusting. Why we didn't just make a pot of actual soup is beyond me.
The mushroom stabbing scene looks weak and pathetic because my aim is weak and pathetic. Yes, if mushrooms were chasing after me, and I had to spear them to save my life, I'd be as good as dead.
Aren't animated vegetables fun...?