Doing something a little different the next few days here on the Underground Film Journal. Instead of promoting other people’s films, I’m posting up my old film school movies, which I just uploaded to YouTube. There will be three of them. This first one, Aardvarkian Mad, was the final project for my freshman year. It was shot on 8mm (maybe Super-8, I dunno), the format in which it was first screened. Then it was very badly transferred to VHS that I eventually put on to digital tape and then transferred to my hard drive before being uploaded.

I went to film school at the Rochester Institute of Technology and this film was shot and edited in my final semester of 1989. The film also now has a new soundtrack. I originally used a couple of instrumental songs from Depeche Mode, but I don’t recall what they were and, at the time, I just copied them onto tape from a dorm floormate’s CDs. So, the other day I re-scored the film using songs by my favorite band, Bailter Space, off of three different albums, Vortura, Wammo and Capsul. I didn’t edit the actual film at all, except to cut down the opening credits a little so that it’ll play a little better online.

The film stars Philip R. Frey who, if after you watch all three films, was a Robert De Niro to my Martin Scorsese. He was great to work with and really put up with my bizarre directing demands. I’ve lost contact with him over the years, but I hope somehow he stumbles across this. The other two people in the film were fellow RIT freshman who didn’t go on to a second year and I’ve since forgotten their names. They did a really great job here, too.

Aardvarkian Mad only really had one public performance at the RIT end-of-year screenings.