ROX #68: Raw Footage

B: Our 3/4" SP video deck broke. Our camera broke. Xy's camera broke. We were knee-deep in technical difficulties. And we were falling behind in our rigorous production schedule.

So we reached into our arsenal of ideas looking for something quick and easy. We came up with “Raw Footage,” in which we presented big, unedited chunks of video from the ROX archive.

It solved the problem of the moment, and it also provided an interesting change-up from the show's increasingly sophisticated editing techniques. We videotaped an opening and closing segment at Daisybrain Media Center (located in Eric and Rachel's house on 12th Street at the time) in which I bemoaned our broken machinery while Eric tried to provide comedy relief with a porn catalog and some rubber chickens.

The Daisybrain segments bookended the raw footage itself, three segments from some old tapes, stuff which hadn't made it into previous episodes. True to the concept, I didn't perform a single edit within these three segments, so what you see is what came straight out of the camera.

(A year or so later, I came back to this episode and added music, which livens the first segment up quite a bit. This is currently uncredited. If you recognize the soundtrack, please let me know.)

My regret is that we presented this episode as somewhat desperate solution to a technical problem. We shouldn't have made excuses. The whole experience of ROX #68 is more interesting if it's presented as experimental television on the cutting edge, as an antidote to the fast-paced MTV-style programming of the day. That might have seemed daring instead of lame.

Fortunately, on the Web we get a second chance, so [circa 2003] we present[ed] “Raw Footage” here without apology in three chunks.

Update: Many years later, the... [More...]