Minute 18

 Minute 18 (by Fatih Eger)

As you all see in my original minute, there are two guys by a lake, and it seems like one of them is saving the other. And there is a third guy rolling something endlessly. I can’t really tell what it is but it reminded me of a machine gun because of the revolving movement. That’s why I decided to use a mainstream actor/bodybuilder (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from the 70s as comic relief, and make him “shoot” the other two by the water. To give the impression that Arnold is killing them, I reversed that specific part of the original clip in which the men are kind of rising, so that they would go down this time.

The soundtrack of my version of the minute belongs to a cartoon. That’s also where the title comes from (after a minor wordplay). The cartoon is called “Happy Tree Friends”. It looks like a children’s show, but actually it’s not. In each episode there are some forest animals that live peacefully in the beginning, and all of a sudden end up with a brutal death, somehow. I know it’s weird, but I thought the soundtrack would fit well.

By doing all these, I wanted to highlight the impact of bad preservation/wrong storage of the old film spools since we talked about it in our first session. Basically, we see the guys in the original movie as if they are witnessing the death of the spool and are dying at the same time.