A raucous comedy about being stuck in the wrong body. – [Author’s Description]
Mammoth (Jack King-Spooner)
Posted by Terry
on May 13, 2013
A raucous comedy about being stuck in the wrong body. – [Author’s Description]
The executable crashed after the “District 4” interactive bit, and unfortunately I’m not sure I have it in me to watch the first three segments again in full to see what comes next. (That middle menu option between “New” and “End” looks like it might be meant to let you Continue, but doesn’t seem to do anything when I select it.)
In any case, this is a tricky one! At least of what I saw so far, the voice over is so much more…successful than the video, with a couple exceptions in either direction.
But it’s difficult to put that critique into precise words. Maybe it’s that the video content makes me think I totally understand where it’s coming from, what sort of impulses led to it being shot (or, for the more miscellaneous material, assembled), and so I just don’t buy it as anything but Juvenilia, a young artist being blinded a bit by his own power of creation. (I should add: I thought the elevator shaft footage was a notable exception, for example.)
And on the other hand, I thought almost all of the voice over was genuinely fantastic, genuinely…sophisticated. By which I probably mean that it reads to me as in control of its affectations in a way I don’t think the video is.
And yet, I’m excited to see someone reaching toward this sort of work. Hence trying to write up a reaction like this despite not yet being so taken by this particular instance of it. I hope there’s more to come!
I don’t know if it’s due to reading nobody’s comment about the film footage beforehand, but I found the whole of it pretty goddamn captivating and was grateful for the places it went and how it got there. I can understand the point about some (or all) of it being a bit indulgent, but part of me has a lot of sympathy for this sort of creative abandon. Chalk another one up for King-Spooner’s hypnotic work.
Side-point about the interactive title cards: I think they’re beautiful in their spareness. They both serve the rhythm and tone of the piece, the series of ever more frequent, bleaker “downs” instilling a powerful sense of desperation. I don’t think this needed to be interactive in any other way.
I’m glad to hear I might have helped it come off as more captivating instead of the opposite!
For the record, in retrospect, I may have been blinded a bit myself by having been exposed to so much just-starting-out video work years ago, so what I was responding to — perhaps too quickly — was less the potential indulgence of this material and more how I could immediately slot so much of it into specific categories of just-starting-out…tropes.
But, thinking a bit further, I’m not sure that’s such a great spirit of critique, vocalizing that sort of cringe of recognition (including, I should admit, some self-recognition).
I mean, would that be like someone ignoring all that’s utterly great about, say, When All You Have is a Hammer…, in order to cringe at what a cliche it is for someone (particularly someone starting out?) to make a platformer out of rectangles? I feel pretty strongly that would be a ridiculous, probably even insulting, comment. So maybe mine was, too.