I was just talking to my friend Tracy about high school antics…and was tellng her about one of my first “large scale” video projects. It’s the thing that will be on the DVD if I ever make a big movie.
At the beginning of each school year, the music department held a “mixer” for band, orchestra, and choir. It was basically just a party to get all three departments “mixed” together (there was generally harsh lines between the three). The mixer was traditionally organized by a couple of seniors every year.
So our freshman year, to tell the classes about the event, the organizers went to every music class one day, and spent a couple minutes telling the kids the details. My sophomore year, the organizers got smarter, and videotaped the short presentation, so that they didn’t have to miss classes to do it. Junior year it was done by a couple of goofy guys in band, so they videotaped themselves giving the presentation, but threw in a couple jokes.
Then senior year comes. The mixer is organized by my friends Clint, Jason, and Mike. They call me in to help with the video. Not content to just videotape the three of them talking about the event, we put together a whole story. The gist was that Mike, Clint, and Jason (aka B.O.B., or the “Brotherhood of Bones” – they were trombone players) are on a quest to recover missing action figures of the three music directors. Along the way they go to the police station to file a missing persons report, meet a mobster (played by me), search garage sales (shot on location), and Mike is killed (he had to leave to go to work during filming, so we had to kill off his character). The video featured amazing stunts and random “man on the street” video of people saying “The Mixer!”.
It was forty minutes long. About 2 minutes of it actually pertained to the event.
Naturally, the music directors were not pleased. They made us go back and re-edit, as they were not willing to sacrifice an entire class period to show the video (which bugged us at the time, but in retrospect…uh, duh!). We cut out the three minute chase scene…oh, and we had to drop the joke that made fun of people in orchestra.