By It’s always exciting to see early work from one of your favorite artists. It always serves to remind me that every filmmaker I look up to was, at one point, just some dude screwing around with a camera and an editing suite. It’s inspiring, really. At any rate, “Gun Fetish” is a montage Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright edited together at the age of nineteen with a stack of VHS tapes. If you squint, you can see the beginnings of Wright’s frenetic editing style. It’s kinda cool. And, coming from a college whose video program was full of videos like this, it’s good to see that he even had talent at nineteen working only with VHS tapes and a VHS tape-to-tape bay.
Below the cut, you can read the text of Edgar Wright’s blog post accompanying this video, which is reposted here at his request.
[Via Edgar Wright There]
Recently I have been sent, have enjoyed and have reposted lots of filmic mash ups and montages. Some of them by editors as young as nineteen, such as Joel Walden who gave us this most recently.
The montages I’m sent make me a little nostalgic, because that’s exactly what I was doing at age 19. In between making amateur no budget films as a teen, I’d teach myself to edit by cutting together montages of movie clips on a theme. You might have heard me talking to Kevin Smith about it on a recent podcast.
The following clip I edited together while at Bournemouth Art College. Way before I’d ever seen an Avid suite, this was done over some long weekends locked in a VHS tape to tape editing suite. Yes, VHS!
So if you are wondering about the low quality of the sound and visuals in the following montage, there’s a simple answer. All of the clips were sourced from either films I’ve recorded off the TV, sell thru VHS tapes I had bought and also films that happened to be in the college library. I literally had piles of VHS tapes in the edit suite. So that explains some of the glitchy clips.
As for the audio edits, hey it was VHS and I was 19. This is the first time I used a ‘real’ editing suite.
So cast your minds back to the last century and see how I misspent my youth; cutting together bullet ballets to John Lennon’s melodic attack on the NRA.
I give you my 1993 mash up; ‘Gun Fetish’.
Now a couple of things. Before any of you comment “Where’s —– or ——”, bear in mind that the 19 year old me had a limited supply of tapes at the time. Most of these are one I copied off the telly.
I haven’t, as is customary, included a list of the clips, as I thought you guys could guess them all. First one to guess them all in order, including close ups, I will send a little prize.
Apologies to any rights holders, I was young I didn’t know what I was doing. Please don’t arrest me.
And finally. I have another one, if you’d like to see…