Welcome to the Electron Dance Advent calendar. Each day will bring another post from the archives.
Have you watched #warningsigns posted on 1 July 2014?
#warningsigns was conceived as a launch video for a big Electron Dance series… except then I turned that series into a book which has still not seen the light of day. So the video became a standalone project although remained representative of the book.
#warningsigns was devoid of narration yet had to tell a story. Every scene was pondered over. Everything had to mean something. But this was the video to end all videos. It took a year to make and production devoured so much time I decided I would never make another video for Electron Dance as long as I lived.
I knew it would never be a big YouTube hit – it got several hundred hits at the time – but it was just something I had to do, had to get out of my system. Despite being exhausting, today I have no regrets because I continue to find #warningsigns hypnotic and engaging.
It also bears ten copyright claims.
What Happened Next
I made a brief return to filmmaking a year later for Electron Dance’s five year anniversary. This was despite swearing in the newsletter I would never do video work again. I personally prefer reading to viewing (it takes me forever to watch anything Chris Franklin puts out) but chose to mimic the video essay format for this one-off: write an essay, recite it over some game footage.
Of course, having made #warningsigns, I could never just make “a simple video essay”. I threw in some music and visual tricks to make it more interesting… and discovered people liked this, they liked it a great deal.
And that was the end of my self-imposed video celibacy.
From the comments:
- Amanda Lange: “Wow, powerful stuff. Reminds me of “Who Killed Video Games”…”
- ShaunCG: “Stitching the overall thrust of argument together is going to be fun”
- Richard Goodness: “I have watched the movie. I need to digest it and perhaps watch again.”
- iDragonarion (on YouTube): “I strongly agree with the message of the film, as well. I’ll be going through the material for months.”
- John Gottschalk (on YouTube): “The fonts are terrible, but I really dig this, especially the Mother metaphor is very on point.”
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FYI, both links that are meant to lead to #warningsigns (http://www.electrondance.com/warningsigns-a-short-film-about-videogames/ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_pI3dFpInI) instead currently lead to “The First Open World” (http://www.electrondance.com/the-first-open-world-part-one/)
Aaaaaargh thank you Luke. As you can no doubt tell, copy and paste has been seeing me through. “I’ll do just one more” I said to myself sleepily on Sunday night. This post was that just one more.
Of course this screws up the emailed copies of the posts 🙁