“Two-Headed Boy” by Ian Cavalier
Saturday, August 24, 2002
I completed my second (and last?) short film today, titled Two-Headed Boy (the title was inspired by the Neutral Milk Hotel song). It is 3:34 long and, like my first film, was shot using a crappy super 8 camera (borrowed from the Northwest Film Center in Portland) on Kodak Tri-X reversal film and Eastman Ektachrome color reversal film.
(By the way, in case you don’t know, I explained more about what super 8 film is sometime in June. It has nothing to do with the motel.)
This film was shot in one day at the H.B. Van Duzer Forest State Scenic Corridor, in between Salem and the Oregon coast, with very little planning. My friend John starred and I followed him around with the camera and tripod. The ending (shot in my very own bedroom) is silly, but overall it came out halfway decent.
Again, like my last film: I created the digital video you see embedded below by projecting my film onto a screen at the NW Film Center and recording it with my Canon PowerShot digital camera in video mode. Thus, the quality sucks. And since my digital camera can only record 30 second video clips, I had to keep pausing and rewinding the film in order to have enough overlap on each AVI file to splice them all together on the computer afterward. It was a joy.
If you move your mouse over the Flash video below, a menu will appear with Play, Pause, Stop, and Mute buttons. You may have to wait a few moments for it to load before it will play all the way through.
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The soundtrack for this film includes bits of “Dissolved Girl” by Massive Attack, “Chop Suey!” by System of a Down, and “We’re the Same” by Matthew Sweet.