It was 1987. I was in my second year of film school (God, how I hate that term - film school... But it did let you make mistakes as a creator; it was an incubation space). Anyway, we had to do a video cut to music. So I convinced my buddy, Ed Vitunski, to go down to the arcade strip on Yonge Street, here in Toronto...
Then, Yonge was a seedy street, with lots of these quarter arcades... Now?... It's becoming less and less seedy each day, with a glassy, plastic, sickly saccarine sheen to it. Frankly, I miss the Old Yonge Street... But I digress...
The owners at one place HATED us shooting video in their place. I guess there were a lot of less-than-savoury-types hanging around there... Underworld somehow. Eh... that was the arcade clientelle. We snuck some shots anyway, and got some good footage before they noticed us and kicked us out. Then we moved on to the next arcade... there were so many back then.
Now gaming is totally isolated... Back then, you'd meet people at these places - join in together with a stranger to put in quarters and defeat the Ultimate Boss of some game... Now, we're all in our own little cells... But I digress...
Anyway, we shot footage of guys playing videogames. Some were real rockstar players: guys who were in their zone. Most were just messing around.
We also shot loads of my collection of cracked Commodore 64 games.
Plus we shot my friend Scotz (who's now a respectable advertising and real estate man, in the US), and his loopy football buddy, acting as if they were playing.
Then I cut it to Great Balls of Fire!!!, by Jerry Lee Lewis!
The result, I present here...
My next foray was some time later, in 2000, when I did something called SERVICES: The Counter-Strike Documentary (which is a whole other story...). Anyway, I put online this trailer for that documentary about Counter-Strike...
I've only had these on Youtube the past couple years. They haven't attracted much attention there. However, the original videos I put online the way videos were shared BEFORE Youtube: as DivX movies, spread among hardcore gamers and web geeks, in zipped-up files you could download, unzip, then play. I have no idea how many times those videos were downloaded and viewed, but they have lived on the Internet since 2000. Before Youtube.com. Before Gametrailer.com.
So I think, maybe, I was a pioneer of this whole game trailer thing. Okay, I can see that maybe that's a cheesy ambition... but on the other hand, I think the videos I did next, to demonstrate my work in Reduction, might show what can be done in a game trailer...
Okay, those missions above (Missions 1, 3, 4 and 5 in the Reduction Trailer, and Mission 2 in the latter two trailers)... It was on those missions that I cut my teeth on Reduction.
By Mission 6, I had hit my stride with this project...
This is the original trailer for Mission 6. From the beginning, I had planned to contrast in-mission action with The Doors' Five in One. I like the way it speaks from the "bug's perspective"... The result...
Technically, ALL of these trailers violate copyright. This is something that German viewers often bother me about. (The videos are blocked in Germany.) When they point this out, I kindly mention the ads at the bottoms of the video. The rights holders have monetized them on their own initiative, instead of blocking them. I guess they think they're high enough quality, I guess. In other words, I've claimed Fair Dealing (Fair Use, in US copyright law): my video features your song, your song features my video... You get ad revenue, I get exposure. We both benefit. That's Fair Dealing... You dumbass Germans!
Anyway, I'll be done the sixth mission of Reduction shortly. And I'll post yet another game trailer to show it.
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