So Friday was the Arts Day Festival for the college, and it went very well. Me, I was sick as a dog, but slogged through the day somehow anyway. My part was editing a video that had been shot by the students, a 20-minute film including interviews with performing students and clips of their performances. We also had an ending sequence a la “There’s Something About Mary,” in which the cast lip-synched the words to a song–“Build Me Up Buttercup” in the case of the movie, but we went with “What I Like About You.” Some fun stuff in there.

For now, I’m uploading a movie file of just the introductory part, a 4-minute segment spoofing the Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (remember the opening sequence where Indy steals the golden idol? That part). Last year, we had a bit of a Star Wars parody which went well, and so we got more ambitious this year. It’s amateur for certain, loaded with continuity errors and other goofs, some unintentional, some forced by restrictions on where we could film. But it was all good fun, and worked out well enough. Everyone got a good laugh from it at the festival. There are parts you won’t recognize if you’re not from the school. For example, the school made a good promotional video one year and got an award for it, a little golden statuette which has been sitting on the counter in the front of the main office for a few years. Everyone in the school knows about it, having seen it all the time, which is why we used it as Indy’s golden idol. Similarly, we used items familiar in the school to replace elements of the Indy sequence–a Boggle game used in classes instead of Indy’s bag of sand, a microphone from a school tape recorder in place of Indy’s whip. Hopefully, the localized touches won’t make you miss much.

The file is available as a QuickTime movie file (35 MB), or as an .m4v movie file (20 MB, also compatible with video iPods). Please try the .mv4 file–it’s the fastest and smallest (in megabytes) compression type, and has the same quality as the .mov file. You may need the latest QuickTime installation (which you should have anyway).

click image to download the m4v file (20 MB);
if you get a string of nonsense text, come back and right-click
and download the movie for desktop viewing.

click image to download the mov file (35 MB)

Let me know if there are any problems with downloading.

Here’s a bit of a fun quiz: how many continuity errors and goofs can you spot?

When I get a chance, I’ll try to put a copy of the whole video up. You’ll need broadband to get it, of course, just like this video.

More on the rest of Arts Day soon.