Woodsman

Straight off Neil's Tape III (1994) and filmed in high-quality 8mm, I give you The Woodsman!


[Download woodsman.mp4]

I'd like to thank my dad, John, for the opportunity to make all of these by buying the camcorder all those years ago. Happy Father's Day! My sister and I filmed a lot of awesome crap like this which I will be digitizing using a recently-purchased Diamond VC500 that was partially subsidized by a can containing over 1600 pennies. For those who also have this device let me give you a tip: capture to disk using the DVD option because its a hardware MPEG-2 encoder.



Memories ...

• Created in early 1994 at our property in Cinebar, Washington. Sandra and I were 11 and 14, respectively. There was no script; surprised?
  
  
• Editing consisted of shooting everything in the proper order (rewinding and re-shooting on error) and then running audio directly from a tape player when dubbing to VHS. Linear video editing! Since it was all done at once, music had to be ready to go so having a double tape-deck helped. Speaking of the soundtrack, the songs are: Cuts You Up by Peter Murphy, Excitable by Def Leppard, and Woodpecker from Mars by Faith No More.
  
  
• My "costume" utilized sweet snow boots, I loved those things. Also, I had dirt smudged on my nose but you couldn't tell until that close-up.
  
  
• I wrote the credits program in Q-Basic on my Tandy 1000 and captured them with the camcorder on a tripod. The edges of the monitor weren't as apparent when seen on old tube televisions, damn you full bleed!
  
  
• The hat I'm wearing in the spot after the credits is Beavis and Butthead. Huh huh, cool.
  
  
• "Tasker" is the black dog. He passed on long ago and Lady, who lived to an undefinable old age, also died within the last year.
  
  
• The cabin is actually our pumphouse next to the well where we got our water.
  
  
• I didn't actually chop off my hand ...
  
  

I wasn't sure how I'd take seeing this again. It's been a long time and there's still a large embarrassment factor. However, many aspects I forgot and it actually got some honest laughs out of me, which gave me more confidence in putting it out there.