Pioneer Books - Concerned Citizen

Zach Connell
Kyler Sommer

When you think of a concerned citizen the first thing that pops into your mind is someone who is out doing physical service to make the community better. However, it is important to understand that there are many different ways to serve the community, no matter how small the service may be. For our documentary we interviewed a normal person in our community who is making subtle efforts to enlighten the community with more knowledge about books.

Travis works as a manager for Pioneer Books located in downtown Provo. He is a devoted citizen who cares about the people in the community and making sure that people have access to all kinds of books. He believes that people should read because they want to, not because they have to. We feel that this belief is what every community needs. Pioneer books is an easily accessible book store with thousands of different books at a low cost. This is makes it much easier for the community to become more involved literarily and increasing their connection to the arts. It acts similarly to Storyland as talked about in the article “Human Rights and Culture” but is not as complicated. Storyland is more of an artist collaboration to improve the connection people have with the arts, while Pioneer Books is more of an outlet for people to connect with the arts. Both, however, are there to help the citizens.

The way we approached filming the documentary is similar to the short film “House”, by Eams. The short film is shot in a way that shows the beauty of the home in a simplistic way with different screenshots. This style emphasizes the peacefulness and tranquility that can be felt in the home. We wanted to stylize our documentary so that it would depict Pioneer Books as a warm and friendly environment where one can come to read and educate themselves. “House” doesn’t have any interviewees or dialogue which is where it differs from our documentary, but they both use a specific style to show the effect a place can have on people.   

In the future we hope to see more people taking advantage of the cheap, yet accessible book store in order to further their education in the arts. Hopefully by exposing this business and the people that work there, the community can know of its existence and benefit from it.

The Perfect Body - Game for Change

The Perfect Body Game

Looking at today’s media you see a lot of posters and movies that depict females in a much objectified fashion. Most of these advocate unrealistic body proportions that cause many females in society to torture themselves physically and psychologically in order to replicate these models. These issues are displayed in the article Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women¹, linking eating disorders with the cultural expectation to be thin. Although this is a serious issue and needs to be addressed, there is also a problem on the other side with males being objectified in unrealistic ways.

The issues between body expectations of males and females are similar, but are depicted in different ways and lead to different reactions of people to them. Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image as Seen

Through Action Toys², an article discussing the relation between action figures and the male body expectation through the past few decades emphasizes how males are expected to look, especially at an early age. It shows how toys have become more muscular and inadvertently imply that stronger males are more superior. Another article, Sociocultural Expectations of Attractiveness for Males³, touches on the same topic but uses several popular magazines as a way to expose how mainly high muscle mass is the most culturally desired aspect of men.

Coming from the perspective of a male who has dealt with not having the ideal male body image, I wanted to show how irritating it is trying to impress others with looks alone. The game involves three options to try and win the heart of a girl who represents society that expects the perfect body from a male. Each of the options individually are possible to achieve, but all three are not possible to achieve at the same time. The decision to include more than just becoming strong stems from my own observations of how men of certain looks are treated. If a man has nice skin without blemishes and having a nice color to it, he is attractive. Also if a man is dressed the way society deems as attractive, than he is attractive. All of these things are outside appearances that qualify males as being ideal and attractive to the world. These issues can also relate with females as well, but for this game it is only from the male perspective.

What makes it more frustrating is that in order to woo the girl, or society, all three options must be done simultaneously. It is similar to Depression Quest in the fact that it points out the issue and uses the game as a realistic example of how one experiences this issue. My game cannot be finished which was done on purpose because it represents the continual process that males go through in order to try to make themselves attractive for the world. In the end only very few men can achieve this.

1.       http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1980.47.2.483

2.       http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.507.3004&rep=rep1&type=pdf

3.       http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01548254#page-2

World Building Article - Gravity Shift Article 3

The Old Country Tribune

Seeing the Good in the Gravity Shift of ‘86

By Zach Connell     March 14, 2016

 

Frightened Crowd during the 86' Gravity Shift.

As we look back over years, many disastrous Gravity Shifts have interrupted our peaceful lives and for some people has ended their lives. Toady marking the 30^th anniversary of the great Gravity Shift of ’86, now is the time to remember and honor the lives lost during that tragic event. Though on a more positive note, not everyone was negatively affected by the gravity shift. One couple recalls the ‘adventure’ they had that presented them the opportunity to meet and fall in love. After meeting with them, the Redfords, I have come to realize how deeply they honor and respect that day.

The morning of, Mr. Redford got in his car and drove to work. Since he works as a nurse for the hospital, he was greatly needed to help with all the injured people that were coming in. Noticing that his wheels were not getting much traction on the ground, he decided to grab the sand bags in his garage and place them in the trunk of his Toyota. After twelve 50lb bags he was finally able to get his car to rest on the ground the way it should. “I remember seeing animals, trash, and even people stuck on lamp posts and signs. They must have accidently jumped too high, or taken too big of a step that just launched them off the ground. It was really dangerous, and looking back I don’t get why I didn’t realize that I needed to be more safe” Mr. Redford remarks about his trip to work. It’s truly devastating knowing that the people who disappear on those days died as a result of floating up into the abyss.

Mrs. Redford looked out her window on the same morning and thought to herself that she would stay safely inside for the day after hearing about how light the gravity was. However, she was swayed when she saw her cat Sprinkles stuck in a tree, feet dangling above with its claws jabbed into the bark holding on for dear life. “I ran outside to desperately help my poor Sprinkles. The unfortunate thing was that I myself started to rise into the air with each step I took. I was risking my life to save my cat, probably not the smartest decision, but I would hate to see Sprinkles succumb to the weightlessness and float up to heaven. Why Sprinkles was outside in the first place I have no idea” Mrs. Redford remarked.

All of this happened as Mr. Redford was driving by. “I saw a pretty looking girl struggling to get to a tree with an almost floating cat, so naturally I had to stop.” Serendipitously for the both of them, he did stop and helped out his future love. Both individuals remarked in our interview about how fate can be a funny, and slightly ironic thing. They each saw an opportunity to make a frightening situation into a positive memory.

After listening to the story of this lovely couple, I realized how maybe everything does happen for a reason. The grass is green, Christmas comes once every year, indisputable these facts are as the gravity shifts we experience every day. The only way to get through it is to keep a happy face and move along.

The Old Country Tribune holds all rights to this article.                                                                             



Artist Statement

Juan Rodriguez
Nathan Tanner
Addison Hunsaker
Zach Connell

What if we lived in a world where the gravitational force on Earth was variant from one day to another in the same way the weather fluctuates? After some discussion, we realized that such a world would have a lot of implications in comparison to the world we currently live in. Taking in consideration that some days the gravity would be strong enough to gives us a hard time to move around while some other days it would reach such low levels to allows us to float around as if we were on the moon, our buildings would have to be designed in a different way, we would dress differently to adapt to those weight shifts, and we would have perhaps new ways to exercise under such variant conditions. Most importantly, we would have to find ways to work whether those gravitational changes occur or not.

That being said, in this world, people would be more sedentary than nomadic. On heavy days, people would stay home and work from there. Telecommuting would be extremely popular, thus, increasing the amount of people doing business online. This would force the government to put more security in the cybernetic world than real life. Law enforcements wouldn’t be as popular on the streets since most crimes would occur online. Hackers would be as common as we hear robberies in our current world. If required, the government would have access to people’s information in order to track maleficent users. Meanwhile, hackers would constantly find new ways to bypass and avoid government's security patrols. This would create a world where people got used to being surveilled, while at the same time, not being too concerned because they would believe that they are being protected. On the other hand, some regular people wouldn’t agree to the idea of having limited privacy; therefore, some people would create softwares to browse the web anonymously.

In Bleeker’s “Design Fiction,” he not only talks about how design fictions should create functional, interesting materials, but that the design fiction process should derive from a good story. So rather than just creating a world where the gravitational pulls shifted like the weather, we imagined what life would be like for the people who lived in this unexpected and inconsistent world. What would they live in? What kind of sports or games would they play? What was their history like and what stories would they see on the news? What would they wear?

The Pokemon Webspinna Battle

Zach Connell & Daniel Shindler

It’s an intimidating thing, going up in front of one’s entire class and their families and friends dressed as cartoon characters while pretending to fight with each other. This project was much different from anything else in the film program, and because of that we were able to develop some talents that we otherwise would have never been able to.

                The project combined the use of sound effects, costume design, and acting to tell a story. Since these elements are not part of the norm as directing, cinematography, or screenwriting are, it forced us to be more creative. By using the lessons from this exercise, the creativity of the media we create in the future will be more rich and well rounded because we have learned to think about other elements as storytellers.

                The webspinna battle also brought up questions in regards to plagiarism and its sometimes confusing lines. Every sound we used was created by someone else. The look of our costumes were arguably a rip off of Pokemon. If these sounds and costumes were used together as a way to create a new, original story, is it still plagiarism? After creating this battle and watching others, it seems they are a completely new work of art. Much like textual poaching, we used elements of other media to create something completely new. Our Pokemon battle used familiar and new characters while adding an original story. The example of Bob Dylan in the article, “The Ecstasy of Influence” by Jonathan Lethem describes this point well as he used lines and stories from other authors in order to create songs with deeper meaning.

                Not only were the costumes and the sound originally created by other people, but elements of the story we acted out are also present in the Pokemon television series as well as the games. Disobedience is depicted in the show by the main character having a pokemon that doesn’t respect him. This leads to contention between the two. Our battle used elements from that story, but ultimately created something original by adding in modern elements with texting and putting in headphones to listen to music. The mixture of modernism with the popular show creates media that most people can connect with.

                The Webspinna Battle itself is a creative media where our creations and combinations of other media make something original. The combination is something that shows how pokemon and other elements can mix together to create something fun and interesting.

Sound effects:

Hat sound: https://www.freesound.org/people/Speedenza/sounds/168121/

                      https://www.freesound.org/people/Speedenza/sounds/168119/

Battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFV31tNmz8 (0:06)

Gameboy Songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8JbXCe3NJk (0:13)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axKDCZd4Mfc (18:26) (5:35)

Texting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=johVa_3lnmY

Sad Song Options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djVv0EFMEj4&list=PL9E607C02C08C079B&index=4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5anLPw0Efmo&list=PLwvwYYc95p--IAa5Rn-80K_iHhXaztmM

Charmander’s headphone song options:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV3SRlOKfhM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMX2lPum_pg

Commanding Charmander to attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dteSps8RZUY

Charmander Sound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1UsbR5tx8

Pokemon Theme song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuYeHPFR3f0

Pokeball release noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50kv0Ufxolk

Pokeball capture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXF6QISJ5cg

punching sound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa-XmBMtn54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbjn6rHmW4

Flamethrower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouY_2SXtdP8

claws?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv3k30sZ_a4

The Cinderella Edit

As a child I was exposed to animated movies that almost always ended in a happy ending. As great and positive as these movies are, they do not go further than that when it comes to actually teaching about how life really is. They mainly emphasize how good things will always happen, and all of our problems will be resolved instantly. That is why I wanted to take a story that was made into a positive, unrealistic representation of what one desires for reality, and twist it to match how life really works.

I feel that society is becoming too passive and unoriginal with storytelling. Most movies have the ideal resolution, everything just seems to fit into place, similar to the reading, “How Texts Become Real” when the author is describing people’s desire to just have the TV on. People just want to watch TV just like they want the perfect ending, it’s not edifying in any way, just a way to pass the time.

Cinderella is the epitome of happy endings being the result of “magic.” It is not just the fact that everything turns out well in the end, it’s the point that everything will turn out perfect that bothers me the most. The original story was published in Grimm’s Fairytales before Disney ever came to be. Their stories, even Cinderella, have darker themes to them with gruesome events. Specifically for Cinderella the step sisters mutilate their own feet in an attempt to fit the slipper to win the prince. Though even the Grimm tale of Cinderella has a happy ending where the girl gets the perfect man. I do understand that the underlying theme of the story is that patience and hard work will pay off in the end, however, the implications of this are dramatically exaggerated with the ideal yet unrealistic outcome.

In my edit, I twisted the ending so that she does not get what she desires. I believe this ending is tragic, but there is still an important lesson to learn. That is that we need to know how to cope with problems, even when we come so close to ridding ourselves of them. This new edit may not be as enjoyable to watch, but there is much to be said about how it turns out and how that can relate to the audience.

Now you may be wondering what Cinderella has to do with me. I connect with Cinderella because I have been and am working hard to obtain the ideal happy ending. I have noticed that this just isn’t probable. More than likely I will find a girl to love, a job to earn money, and a life that is meaningful. But this future most likely will not involve an elaborate castle with the most beautiful princess. The realization of this has upset me in the past, and others should be aware that these stories are not realistic for us.

Medium Specificity - Scary Story

Hunger

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7996B919559E9827!6923&authkey=!ANH5jvSScK-g5zo&ithint=file%2cwav

Ghost stories have been told and enjoyed for many years. It’s always a thrill to find yourself frightened by a story despite having the knowledge that it is fake. There is even a popular genre within film that displays such stories in a format to elicit fears. What makes these stories so intriguing? I decided to explore this topic by making my Medium Specificity about the art of telling scary stories.

Creating this piece, I wanted to use more than just the words. The story can only go so far on its own, and part of storytelling is actually telling the story to an audience. To tell the story effectively the correct ambience must be established. The audio recorded is manipulated to make a darker sounding voice, and manipulating some of the other audio effects to make it sound creepier. In the past, stories were only told out loud to those listening. As creepy as this was back then, today’s technology allows us to manipulate the stories in a way to make them scarier. Similar to how McCloud explained the history and evolution of comics. They started out more rudimentary, but effective for the time, and ended up how we have them today, which are enjoyed by the present society. Technology allows us to create more interesting and terrifying pieces. The resulting audio emphasizes these dark tones and gives more character to the story without even showing anything.

The picture included represents how the storyteller might look while telling the story. The main part of the picture is the lighting, which represents how dark and moody the atmosphere would be when one is telling a scary story. Specific lighting is used often while someone is telling a scary story. As children, we would hold up a flashlight to our face in a tent. In the television series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a campfire was used to light up the kids’ faces while they told the story. The lighting does an effective job at emphasizing how mysterious and dark the story is, making the story much more frightening than it really is.

The story itself is not scary. However, these elements implemented in with the actual words gives it more of an edge as a scary story. What also adds to the fear of it is the context of the story. For anyone who has been in the same situation as the man, the story would have an element of horror. This is true for any story, it becomes more frightening when the listener can personally connect to it.

All of these elements add to the overall scary story that is presented. It is not so much the story itself that is intriguing to the audience, it is the way that it is executed that draws people in. The scarier the story is told, the better.

Bell

Zach Connell

Weber Griffiths

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByQ989949AxzQmdKWWhXMkExQ0k/view?usp=sharing

This was a very interesting and exciting project, and it really allowed both of us to see history in a new way. Using two sources, listed below, we were able to enter the world of Alexander Graham Bell and intertwine it with the fantasy world we created. Since he was a teacher for the deaf, we thought it would be important to include him doing that, giving him a reason to not be in his workshop and thus creating an incentive for the heroes to track him down. One of the articles mentioned Bell receiving all the credit for his invention, and others criticized him for it. This allowed us to give the Alexander in the story more reason to not trust his Assistant.

This slight blend of historical fact (Bell teaching a class to deaf students and the tension between him and his assistant) allow a certain amount of reality to permeate an otherwise fictional story. It helped to build humor as well by portraying Bell and his assistant at odds with each other. This clarified motivation and also showcased a perhaps less known character trait of the famous Alexander Graham Bell, which added to the “over-the-top” humor of the whole short. It is an almost poetic contrast as well between fantastical time travel and true to life historical fact.

The graphical novel “After the Deluge” by Josh Neufeld is a great example of a creative treatment of an historical event and inspired in part our own work. Though his novel is more serious, Neufeld’s portrayal of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans is done in a creative and new medium not often associated with the genre. It’s colorful sketches and comic book formatting engage the reader in history and allow one to take a whole new perspective on what history means and what it can teach us. Though Bell is humorous and improbable, it echoes similar ideas in its plot. The dichotomous use of fantasy and history uniquely engage the reader in the story and gives them a new (and perhaps very strange) perspective on past events.

This creative treatment of history is seen all over in modern pop-culture, often comedically. As in our script, creative and comedic treatments of history are common and serve to engage and inform an audience. One example of this that reflects our own work is the film Inglourious Basterds (2009). Both Bell and Inglourious Basterds deal with an alternate historical past and specifically they both deal with a comedic execution of a famed historical figure. While Inglourious Basterds is different in many aspect, the comedic execution of Adolf Hitler at the end of the film (A very inaccurate and incorrect portrayal) is very similar to our own execution of Alexander Bell. Both treat lightly major historical events, though not frivolously. It all very intentionally conveys the stories mood and theme while at the same time allowing viewers to see history in a new and creative light.            

Sources

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Graham-Bell

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/alexander-graham-bell

The Elevator Pitch

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=7996B919559E9827!6146&authkey=!AAPFW70h3LzkIus&ithint=file%2cwav

When we were first assigned this project, we were at a loss for what process to create. We felt overwhelmed with the infinite possibilities of processes we could duplicate. What would stand out more so than just duplicating daily, mundane routines? From our viewings, “The Smokehouse” and “Scriptures” were completely different processes, yet they both represented an event—whether it is something that occurs daily or infrequently—in a very creative way. While working with a partner, we were able to combine our creative minds to develop a process that was less common and more innovative. However, it is still a process that has a beginning, middle, and end and tells the narrative of an act of human labor, whether that act be quite rare. We were inspired by our 30-second elevator pitch for our next project: The Historical Story. We recreated the process of entering an elevator, running into someone famous—in this case our made up film critic named Benjamin Thevenin—, pitching a 30-second pitch for a movie, and being embarrassingly rejected.

Recording an event that does not occur often is interesting because it puts into perspective the unpredictability of daily life. While this process was staged, we tried to stay true to what a real chance encounter in an elevator may have been like. The fact that this process is only an audio piece makes it that much more difficult to clearly demonstrate our process. However, it forces the audience to personalize the process and create their own meaning. Similar to the silent film “L'arrivée d'un train en Gare de la Ciotat,” where the audience must imagine what the train would sound like as it comes into the station, our audience must visually imagine the scene we set up for them sonically. Just as everyone knows what the sound of a train sounds like, we can all imagine what an elevator pitch would possibly look like. However, each person has minute differences in what they hear or what they see due to past experiences they may have had with either a train or an encounter in an elevator.

For our process, we found an elevator with typical “elevator sounds,” such as indicator beeping and the voice of a woman repeating the floors we pass. Because there was no elevator music, we decided to add to the ambiance and create our own elevator music, simulating the stereotypical elevator experience. We used an additional person to be the “pitch-giver,” who recreated the fake scene with their own improvised dialogue, adding to the spontaneity of this type of situation. After multiple takes due to unexpected outside elements, our finished product turned out to be truly representative of our chosen process. Every sound within the 60-second piece added to the visual authenticity of our process. Whether it is played out on a screen or heard through audio recording, our understanding of the given process and our creative imaginations inspire us to visualize the process in our own unique way.

Round Robin - The boy who left his pizza

The boy gazes at the pizza laying on the table. The aroma is delightful. A pretty girl walks by and winks. He leaves the pizza and chases the girl.

In the early 1920’s, a new surge of art overcame the aesthetic world. In a hodgepodge of dreamlike, nonsensical images, surrealism was born. The point of surrealist art was to challenge convention-- it represented an uncomfortable deviance from reality. As this art form developed, a parlor game developed along with it. Sitting in their vintage suits, surrealist artists drew a bit of a picture, hid all but the very bottom, and passed it on to another artist to continue. The result was usually grotesque, and always fascinating. An Exquisite Corpse-- a mixture of different artists’ ideas and images that couldn’t quite fit together in a homogeneous form. In an attempt to recreate our own form of this surrealist experiment, we passed snapshots of stories through our round robin of creativity. The resulting stories were just as fascinating as the results of the 1920’s parlor game.

Very early on in the process, we had to surrender our stories. We watched our initial snapshot twist into a jumbled mess of other people’s creative flows. After we got over the initial shock of losing control, however, the process became something beautiful. We “...enjoyed the mesmerising flow of fragments” (Paul D. Miller, “Totems Without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse”). The beauty of our combined creative flows helped us create our hodgepodge of nonsense. That hodgepodge, however, was the point of this whole exercise. When our stories made the least amount of sense, doors of creativity opened in our minds. Suddenly making sense didn’t matter. Fitting a mold didn’t matter. Our “flow of fragments” turned into a pure example of our own freed thought processes and creativity.

Our project process represents something beyond stories-- it represents the world’s creative process on a microscopic scale. Everybody works so differently, sees so differently, processes so differently, that every bit of art is subject to billions of unique perspectives. We may never create anything completely original, but we create things that are uniquely our own. Nobody will be able to copy the intrinsic meaning we assign to our own art, just as we will never understand exactly what somebody else’s art means. All of the art in this world comes from this individual synthesis of our surroundings. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí worked together on the 1929 film “Un Chien Adalou”, resulting in a nonsensical representation of their dreams in art form. They didn’t come up with anything new, they just came up with their own interpretation of the information they had.

The tenuous strings of narratives we created illustrate the simple, beautiful fact of our diversity. We work so differently, see so differently, process so differently… Isn’t it amazing how individual our worlds are? How we are able to come up with such a unique synthesis of our surroundings? Our stories are barely interconnected, overflowing with our ideas and interpretations and information. We may not have made sense in our exquisite corpse storyboards, but we did make something-- and that, ultimately, is what matters.

Music Mosaic

Audiomachine - An Unfinished Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju8Bk2Dhi-c

Listening to the song “An Unfinished Life” by Audiomachine emphasizes particular feelings from inside of me. A feeling of anticipation, dread, uneasiness, but also a feeling of hope. The photographs that I took really capitalized on these feelings and made them real for me. Just about all of the photos are underexposed giving them a darker feeling, but some of them have lighter values that show that hopeful emotion. It is similar to the painting “Fisherman at Sea” by Joseph Turner. There is a very dark undertone to the painting, with a little bit of light illuminating the fishers. Some of the photos that I captured have a similar feeling to them, such as the picture with the tools and the picture with the lone tree.

Another element is implemented in a few of the photographs by the contrast of a single object against the background. There are two specific examples of this, one is of the man, and the other is of the tree. They both represent loneliness and expectation within a gray world. These were conscious decisions that were made when I was taking the pictures.

The day that I took these photographs was very rainy and cold. This miserable environment added to the context of the pictures. It made the feelings in the song feel more real as I was thinking of the song in my head while framing and taking the pictures. However, the fact that I was with friends while taking the pictures gave the photography adventure a more positive light, which is emphasized in the pictures.

Working on this assignment has helped me connect more with Annie Dillard when she was talking about seeing life on a smaller, more detailed scale. A lot of my photographs were wide angled shots of landscape, but I did experiment more with taking close up pictures of rocks and other geological features. It helped to look at something in nature, and figure out the best way to manipulate it in such a way to make a beautiful picture with meaning, even if the object in real life was just a rock. An example is with the photograph of the snow on the rock. There is character there; a rock with lots of grooves and imperfections is covered with a layer of snow. The snow covers up the imperfections, but leaves the rock with little individuality. I would have never seen that in the rock if I didn’t put forth the effort to focus on it and give it character through the photograph.

“An Unfinished Life” is a beautiful song that encapsulates the feelings of hope amidst much despair and loneliness. I feel that the content and the context of the photos provided emphasizes these emotions and makes the song feel more real and personal to me.

Thinking and Writing - Too Many Cooks, Short Film

Television shows have been gaining popularity more and more through the decades. Several shows have especially become popular like Full House, The Office, The Walking Dead and many others. Adult Swim is a television station that is known for showing animated shows that have more adult material. It also shows late night television spots and infomercials. One such television spot, Too Many Cooks, has recently caught the attention of many people when it was aired in the early morning. It is a short film that at first appears to be a new show, but slowly evolves more and more until the audience realizes that it is not a show and in fact a parody of classic television shows, mainly from the 80’s and 90’s. Too Many Cooks is a parody focused on explaining how culture and society has become more and more obsessed with television shows.

This argument will be explored via two aspects. The first based on the in video content, and the second being the context. There are many elements within the content of the video where the television media is being parodied. At first everything seems normal, the introduction is very similar to family sitcoms from the 80’s and 90’s. When you feel like the introduction sequence should have ended, it keeps going, as if to say that amount of new shows being made every year keeps rising. The video continues to go through many different film genres such as comedy, detective, cartoon, soap opera, cooking shows, sci-fi, doctor shows, and even the old Brady Bunch style for a little bit. Showing each genre as it did emphasizes that those television genres are all under the same curse as each other. This curse being that television shows are being obsessed too much over by society.

Another element in the video is a specific character that is emphasized as a motif. This character shows up near the beginning as a creepy killer man. His appearances aggressively become worse and worse. These appearance represent the consumers of television because of their desire to become more and more apart of the show itself. People in today’s culture feel the desire to learn everything they can about a show and keep up to date on them religiously. The man’s grotesque visual in the video can be related to that of the consumers who demand television constantly and as a result it takes over their life and they metaphorically “feed” on it like the creepy guy did in the video.

Toward the end of the video, there is a segment that is dedicated to what a television show should do, which is to actually play the show. The short length of what is played represents how little there is in many shows today content wise. Most of the emphasis in today’s shows are on the people who made the show, which is also implied by the entirety of the cast present in the short seconds of the ending to Too Many Cooks.

Speaking contextually, there are a few items that should be highlighted that make this short film different than popular television. The first being the time that it was aired. It was played early in the mornings during the week, which happens to be a time when hardly anybody is awake. This is truly a humble act of the creator and the studio for airing it at such an odd time, where hardly anybody would stumble upon it, avoiding any kind of hypocrisy that could arise if it was aired during a popular time on a more popular station. Of course the counterargument here being that that time was the only time the creator could afford, especially since it was so low budget that Casper Kelley, the creator, had to put in his own personal hours in order to finish it.

Of course the director did not intentionally have this theme in mind when he created the film. He said that he wanted it to be more like an 80’s sitcom. And since it was filmed on a comedy station, its intentions could have been more to entertain by poking fun at television shows, rather than informing people of the effect that it is having on the culture. There are many other parodied short films that are aired on the same station and at the same time slots as Too Many Cooks. It is possible that this short video is just another film made to catch the attention of the few who remain awake.

That being said, Too Many Cooks still provides strong ideas about today’s culture having too much of an obsession with television. This is exemplified by the content and context which creates a parody that makes fun of the many popular shows that are out today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8