Thomas Veil
Oct 11, 2004, 05:43 PM
Remember a few weeks back when I said I was working on an anti-Bush project? Well, here's the story.
We have a public access TV facility in town, and a friend and I have always talked about doing a program of some kind for it.
A few weeks ago -- even before the debates -- we were talking about Bush's disingenuousness in his speeches: his careful selection of facts, his distortions, his leaving out of unpleasant truths. And I suggested: wouldn't it be funny if we could take one of his speeches and insert satiric comments, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000?
My friend agreed, although I quickly found that it's hard to actually get ahold of a speech on video. The networks don't cover them in total, and while C-SPAN does, it does not allow its videos to be used for any purpose, by anybody else.
So it became apparent that the only way to get video of an entire Bush speech was to record it ourselves. To that end, I found out when he would be appearing around here, and called the local Bush-Cheney headquarters to inquire about getting in.
I won't go into the machinations of how I managed to convince them to let me bring a video camera. Let's just say that I managed to talk my way in.
When I showed up at the site of the rally, I was stopped no less than three times by various campaign workers or police who eyed me suspiciously. Two of the three times, they had to radio their superiors to get them to approve my entrance...and each time, they did. I couldn't believe my luck. Three times I could have been dead in the water, and three times I got through.
So anyway, I set up in a good location and...well, the rest is all on videotape.
Yup. I got it all. I couldn't believe no one was on to me. All the way home, I half-expected to be pulled over by a patrol car and have them confiscate my tapes. :D
So now I have the raw footage, and I've been working on it, to air on our public access station.
When discussing it further with my cohort, we ended up agreeing that a pure satire a la MST3K might not be the way to go. Remember our discussion of satire in a thread a few weeks back? We felt that it amuses the faithful and ****es off the other side, but it really doesn't do much in terms of education or persuasion.
So we thought about a more serious approach. We ended up settling on a fun idea. Remember VH-1's Pop-Up Videos? We showed the speech uncut, but we inserted all kinds of "pop-up" comments into it. Everywhere Bush fudged, we put in a clarification. Everywhere he misled, we pointed out the facts.
And yes, we got in a couple of snide remarks, because we just couldn't resist.
You can see a couple of brief clips of our video here (http://users.adelphia.net/~tjveil/movies/Bush*it Clip 1.MOV) and here (http://users.adelphia.net/~tjveil/movies/Bush*it Clip 2.MOV).
These are 9 and 13 MB files, respectively.
The show starts airing tomorrow, and will run several times this week. I figure it'll take, oh, about five minutes before the first complaint hits the cable office. :D
We have a public access TV facility in town, and a friend and I have always talked about doing a program of some kind for it.
A few weeks ago -- even before the debates -- we were talking about Bush's disingenuousness in his speeches: his careful selection of facts, his distortions, his leaving out of unpleasant truths. And I suggested: wouldn't it be funny if we could take one of his speeches and insert satiric comments, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000?
My friend agreed, although I quickly found that it's hard to actually get ahold of a speech on video. The networks don't cover them in total, and while C-SPAN does, it does not allow its videos to be used for any purpose, by anybody else.
So it became apparent that the only way to get video of an entire Bush speech was to record it ourselves. To that end, I found out when he would be appearing around here, and called the local Bush-Cheney headquarters to inquire about getting in.
I won't go into the machinations of how I managed to convince them to let me bring a video camera. Let's just say that I managed to talk my way in.
When I showed up at the site of the rally, I was stopped no less than three times by various campaign workers or police who eyed me suspiciously. Two of the three times, they had to radio their superiors to get them to approve my entrance...and each time, they did. I couldn't believe my luck. Three times I could have been dead in the water, and three times I got through.
So anyway, I set up in a good location and...well, the rest is all on videotape.
Yup. I got it all. I couldn't believe no one was on to me. All the way home, I half-expected to be pulled over by a patrol car and have them confiscate my tapes. :D
So now I have the raw footage, and I've been working on it, to air on our public access station.
When discussing it further with my cohort, we ended up agreeing that a pure satire a la MST3K might not be the way to go. Remember our discussion of satire in a thread a few weeks back? We felt that it amuses the faithful and ****es off the other side, but it really doesn't do much in terms of education or persuasion.
So we thought about a more serious approach. We ended up settling on a fun idea. Remember VH-1's Pop-Up Videos? We showed the speech uncut, but we inserted all kinds of "pop-up" comments into it. Everywhere Bush fudged, we put in a clarification. Everywhere he misled, we pointed out the facts.
And yes, we got in a couple of snide remarks, because we just couldn't resist.
You can see a couple of brief clips of our video here (http://users.adelphia.net/~tjveil/movies/Bush*it Clip 1.MOV) and here (http://users.adelphia.net/~tjveil/movies/Bush*it Clip 2.MOV).
These are 9 and 13 MB files, respectively.
The show starts airing tomorrow, and will run several times this week. I figure it'll take, oh, about five minutes before the first complaint hits the cable office. :D
