From Jascha's new album THE FUTURE LIMITED (2012) * Free album download for a limited time at thefuturelimited.com * "What if the evil machine wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood?" Directed and edited by John Pavlus, remixing footage from: 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick Robocop, dir. Paul Verhoeven TRON, dir. Steven Lisberger Moon, dir. Duncan Jones WarGames, dir. John Badham =============== I've been curious for a while about whether I could re-edit images, shots and scenes from well-known movies to tell different stories from the ones I borrowed them from. The music video for Jascha's "Limited" seemed like a great opportunity to experiment with this approach, since the song instantly suggested to me a science-fiction short story -- and I didn't have the time (or interest, to be honest) to create sci-fi production value from scratch. It also seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much "baggage" over the years -- like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for "evil machine" -- and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That's exactly the image that Jascha's plaintive refrain in "Limited" put into my head. Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn't the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it's a good one. Some interesting background on artificial intelligence from BERG, a tech/design consultancy in London, that I only discovered after making the video but seems to be in the same wheelhouse of what I was thinking about when I edited it: berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/04/b-a-s-a-a-p/

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