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Purple Tentacle's Downfall

Started by Purple Tentacle, October 04, 2004, 11:18:24 AM

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Purple Tentacle

.... or My Very First Film By Purple Tentacle, aged 18

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD, 50MB - 8 minutes (DivX Codec) (right-click save-as please, my server's shaky enough without streaming!)

DivX codec to be found here: Clicky (insert fake email address, it won't check)


(Apologies about the file size... for some reason my computer has now decided to freeze whenever exporting to XVid, very annoying..... I'll try and knock it down to 30MB tonight, which was the size of the previous films were... christ file compression is tedious.
___________________________________________________________________________

This is the very first film I shot at University, and pretty much the first "proper" film I did, although my friend and I monopolised the school camera for years under the pretence of shooting educational videos, and instead making the obligatory teenage gore-fests and Star Wars spoofs.  We also shot a trilogy of half-hour films with He-Man figures, which I haven't watched for years and years, and I must dig out sometime.  Anyway.......


In my first year of University I immediately fell in with the "wrong crowd".... that is a gaggle of drunken girls who had no intention of shagging me and yet constantly kept me hanging around and chasing off any nice, normal girls that would approach me, while spending every other weekend in an ambulance, wasting the NHS' time and money.  Horrible. (Them in ambulances, not me. I had to fucking apologise for them, urgh)

However it's not entirely fair to blame my lack of cock/fanny action on them, as at the time I looked like this:


After 3 months of that shit I had enough, and never went out with them again.  Instead I fell in with a group of friends that have stuck to this day, including my very good friends Andy and Paul, also studying on my course.  I had briefly worked with them both seperately, with Paul on a 1-day practice shoot (a terrible piece of student predictability involving broken glass sandwiches and guns), and Andy on a practise radio broadcast (an even worse knocked-up comedy skit about EC regulations and Ostrich eggs... fucking hell.... our lecturer, who would later get sacked for getting caught being sucked off by an 18 year old student, said that our performance was comparable to Spike Milligan and Kenneth Williams. You can only imagine how bad it was.), but we had a final-year video project to complete, none of us had had the foresight to pair off with anybody else in time, so the three of us found ourselves with a load of video equipment, 3 days booked in an Avid, and no idea what we wanted to do, thrown together by default.

We decided to head to Ramsgate, where I was living at the time, as we thought that nobody else would think of shooting a film on the beach (wrong), as it was the middle of January and sub-zero temperatures.   We went into my dad's basement and tried to work out what the hell we were going to do.

We all agreed that all students make films about gangsters and try to ape Tarantino, so vowed not to do that.  As you will see, the film is all about a gangster, and attempts to ape Tarantino. Well done us.

The dialogue is (shock horror) made up as we went along, and hinges around one gag that the film owes its title to.
However, possibly the most shocking thing about this film is
a) My appalling acting, truly fucking diabolical,
b) Andy's quite good acting, and
c) MY HAIRCUT!

For my entire teenage years I had had shoulder length hair, but when I hit 18 I had it all chopped, and spent £60 on a really great haircut, it looked ace. However I would then decide to get it cut and re-dyed half-red on the cheap, by a fucking idiot.  She gave me a truly bizarre half-bowl of bright, comic-relief red, which is what I was stuck with when shooting this film. Point and laugh, everybody.

Anyway, the plot is that, playing myself, I land myself in a poker game that I can't get out of. The really annoying thing is that NONE OF US HAD SEEN LOCK STOCK!!

In the post-mortem, when all the students comment on each other's films, we were roundly condemned for ripping off Lock, Stock... when we had honestly not seen it, and I thought the sped-up card sequence was dead original! But fuck 'em, their films were all shit anyway.

Another noteworthy fact was that the January temperatures were below zero, and I got very poorly after shooting the climax. Andy bought me a Mars bar to compensate.

This was also the first film I ever edited on a computer, previously I had done everything on VHS-VHS pause-and-record, and I was surprised at how intuitive Avid was. For the next year we were forbidden to use computers and had to edit everything by hand, so I tried to make the most of the opportunity.

There's plenty to laugh at (including a dog with an enormous dick), some atrocious acting and dubious editing, but a couple of the gags still raise a smile to my face, and it found me a great couple of friends.


Andy is now the highly successful breakfast show DJ on Star FM in Cambridge and has appeared in panel shows with Roland Rivron. I am still jealous of his career.
Paul still does stuff with me, the fool.

___________________________________________________________________________________
DOWNFALL, Jan 1999
Carbon Copy, Feb 2001
Time to Go, Feb 2001



As usual, more Whore's films please! Come on, you're all talking about how much you love Vegas Video etc, prove it!

Timmay

Quote from: "Purple Tentacle"As usual, more Whore's films please! Come on, you're all talking about how much you love Vegas Video etc, prove it!
Hey sucka, you won't get me on no film. I edit, I don't star. Even with this chin.

I would show you my production efforts, but so far they're restricted to wedding videos. All highly dull for anyone who wasn't there, as you can imagine.

Downloading your effort now though... the lure of The Hair was too much.

Timmay

Hehe... The Hair didn't disappoint.

You were a cross between...



...and...



I hereby name you Vyvyan Rotten!

Very good though - I like the long-distance shot on the beach without a tripod, all shakey like. Did you not want to get the camera too close to the spray?

Purple Tentacle

We forgot to bring a tripod.

Erm... no... I mean, we were aiming to break the fourth wall and bring the viewer into the action as if they were a voyeur... yes, that's it.

The long-shots WERE meant to look "candid", but pretty stupid thing to do without a tripod.

The spade breaking while I was digging was a genuine accident, the look on my face is genuine despair.

Oh, and I fucking hate soundtracks and slowed-down-video now.

Good christ that beach was cold, and the hole I was in was neck-deep in freezing sea-water.

The compression may have obliterated the subtelties of the soundtrack, but it was also pissing with rain that day as well, so the enormous video camera was covered in binbags.  Ummmm, don't tell my lecturers.


Purple Tentacle

So... 25 downloads.... any comments?

Hehehe, go on, just to mock my stupid spotty face!

Lt Plonker

Heh, I liked that.  :)

I didn't notice the red tint until you had reached the beach. Very snazzy, I thought.  What was that thing hanging out of your pocket, by the way? I only noticed it because I have a chipmunk hanging out of mine.


splattermac

I didn't read your blurb, I just homed in on the download.

Having gone back and read it I'd say you were the one who was believable on screen and your mate was a total dope. I also thought you were about sixteen but you must have been older, you gangly youth.

So now I've watched this I want to see something recent to see how far you've come. Get your 'giz a job' wowing portfolio stuff out.

Almost Yearly

Just watched the showreel.


RAWK !!

Rats

Aye, that was canny. It must have looked great on paper

"Bloke loses card game, gets buried in sand", fuck it, that'll do, we'll improvise.

Morgan

I'm just giving this a bump as I'm downloading it at the moment, and whilst it may well be shit I liked the idea of the thread.

Morgan

Oi Edward, how come I can't see no visual shit?  Nice soundtrack though.

slim

Quote from: "Morgan"Oi Edward, how come I can't see no visual shit?  Nice soundtrack though.
I think you probably need to update your DivX codec.