Argument post-production notes

I started with the middle, musical interlude. I shot the first bits of my friend Chris walking through Loews specifically for the purpose of depicting him walking into Loews to buy robot-making supplies. I laid down the music first and over the course of the days I edited, split up the Sufjan track into whatever would give it the most dramatic effect. I had to start with the vibraphonic part at the beginning and then work my way up to his heavenly voice but stop there. I wanted to end with, as Chris walks out of that big-box store, the part at the very end of the song with the ethereal choral part. I eventually settled on the part with the trumpets. Let's just say Sufjan makes me feel the (Illi)noise, I'm that big of a fan. I laid it out in the obvious order and with the visual details that I want people to catch. It's probably the singlemost sequence I spent the most thought on. It's pretty much how I feel about consumer capitalism. It's like a journey and in the end, you walk off into the sunset with wonderful music in the background.

This was an obvious transition between Tom Abram talking and us building the robot, but specifically it moves from him saying that a costume would suffice, rather than actually building a robot. I laid down the interview bits in order to expose exactly what FARM BOT is, what he represents, Tom's thoughts on the Chief with respect to FARM BOT, his uniting power, and how he would be implemented. I figured it was a good bit of exposition and argumentation wrapped into one. I inter-spliced whatever talking head-slash-cut scene footage I could and left the rest of the longer bits for later. I did the intro. It took about four or five times to get Chief Questionmark right in Photoshop. I originally had a blank-faced Chief and added a questionmark with iMovie's very limited titling utility. It didn't fly. I had to use the music, it was a song my brother's former powerviolence band did, it depicts the bad-assery and the hardcore-ness of the Chief, or at least the anticipation of such a bad-ass or hardcore mascot. And then the talking heads.

Next, I combed through my iTunes and made a play list of "songs that a robot would listen to or be built to." I already had one in mind, but compiled one so I could have something to jam out to when building my piece. In the end, it was "Glass Danse" by the Faint that you hear. There's something about the synth part that screams mechanical. I laid that out like I usually do, sequentially and semi-randomly. Whatever looks good and has a variety of action I say. At that point in editing, I switched over to the external hard-drive and imported into it the hour or so footage I had of FARM BOT wreaking havoc or giving hugs or whatever. It would end up being something like 23 gigs of space and would have crushed my drive like FARM BOT crushes his enemies.

I decided the Flaming Lips were an obvious choice for a robot that is warm and alone in the world as he walks into campus. I chose a lot of footage that suggested that no one paid attention to him as he walks down Wright Street. I almost showed the girl in crutches walking off the bus instead of waving half-heartedly, I felt that bad for the FARM BOT. There was a girl who walked onto the bus who did a great double-take, but it wouldn't have fit. The next song I laid down was too ironic a track to pass up. I think the title, "Warm Panda Cola" says enough about the song itself. It was either that or an Iron and Wine song. What mindset I was in when I put those onto my robot playlist, I don't know. But I used a really bubbly and happy song and I'm sticking to the decision to accentuate the fact that FARM BOT is as Tom put it, "as soft as metal gets."

And then somewhere in there, my hard drive got unplugged and then it ruined my project file for iMovie forever. Luckily inside the iMovie package file there's a constructed quicktime movie that you can view, so I had to piece it back together from that, which took a bit, and then haul over the clips I wanted to conclude the movie with and sprinkle in between Tom's talking head bits. The crisis was averted.

I ended up with arguments against the other mascots and some underhanded visual trickery against the Illini Dinosaurs because dinosaurs do not represent our great state so much as as a dancing robot. As ridiculous as that sounds, it's very true. Because the dancing robot shoots corn, which is the point I got across hopefully. That and I added the scholarly bits that took research. Those are actual unofficial mascots at other school. For brevity's sake and because iMovie handles long centered titles badly, I used short inter-titles. Before that, I ended with Tom telling the audience what to do about FARM BOT (and the obligatory facebook inclusion). I figured putting that over what he says is okay because what he says is rather ridiculous (holding a candlelight vigil to show to people how we would feel if there wasn't a FARM BOT). And then I really end it with my friend Justin with "Let's Cornhole 'Em" which seems to be the adopted rallying cry of our movement.

I thank Tom that he sent me those drawings that Eric Uskali made for his design project. His heart was in the right place when he drafted it two years ago. We'll just say his presentation mentioned "central american military juntas" as a potential customer for the corn cannon besides FARM BOT. I finished up by trolling through google images for pictures that would make sense to cut into his talking head. And the credits. because I really like... this class. It won't make any sense when I post it to youtube, but they're just going to have to deal with it.