These Boots are Made for Controversy

I've got nothing better to do, so I'm going to toot my own horn.

One of the last projects I made while in school as a Film and Video major was a "table-top" piece called Paddy Doyle's Boots. The guidelines for the project were that it had to be enacted on a table, in miniature, or all in extreme close-up. I went with miniatures, because that gave me an excuse to bust out my old GI Joes and play with them in front of a camera (as though I needed an excuse.)

I decided while planning the piece that I was tired of the extreme and accepted liberal bias of both my professor and classmates alike, and set out to get some good ol' conservative criticism in edgewise. It was the first time I did this, having remained (mostly) apolitical in my previous offerings, making instead a point to create moral parables. Before I continue with my story, go ahead and take a look at the short. It's only about three and a half minutes.



So as you can see, I turned my table-top project into a criticism of modern war journalism and the media's insistence on moral equivalency in its handling of Islam and the War on Terror. Unfortunately, my supposedly open-minded professor wasn't amused. In fact, he was quite offended and let me know just how much he disapproved by grading me down to a low B. His reasons? He said some of the jokes fell flat. That's it. Jokes he didn't like or get, he said "fell flat." Nobody else was graded on the quality of the humor in their projects. I challenged the professor on this, and his example was the CNN logo at the end.
I asked him, "If it had been Fox News, would that have been better?"
He said yes. He actually told me, that if I had used the Fox News logo instead of the CNN logo, I would have received a better grade.
That B cost me graduating Summa Cum Laude.

One more story about this project:

On the Saturday afternoon I began filming, I set up a table and green screen in my living room. I put the camera on sticks and arrayed all of my GI Joes and associated props. Then I lit everything with Arri lights, so it got hot quickly (I think this was in April). As is my custom, I stripped down to only my boxer shorts to keep from sweating to death. After all, I was alone in my own apartment.

At one point I was holding one of the GI Joes, molding him into position when I heard the door open. Assuming it was one of my roommates, I paid no attention. Then I heard a muffled giggle.

I turned around to see a strange girl standing behind me as I stood in my boxers, seemingly playing with toys in front of a camera.

"Oh, hey. What's up?" I asked.

She exploded into laughter and ran upstairs to my roommates room. I never saw her again.