Edgar Wright may be the most successful nerd out there. And I don’t mean “successful” in the sense of the nerd who has reached the highest level of success (that’s clearly Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg). I’m talking about a person who is successful at being a nerd. That’s not an easy task when you’re doing it from a public position of fame and success. It is an awkward balance to strike. Cause there is nothing more annoying than a cool person pandering and pretending to be a nerd (ie, every hot girl who hosts/co-hosts some dork oriented show), yet true dweebs rarely rise to a position of cool without some kind of abandonment of their geeky roots. Wright manages to stay strong.
The latest example is this post from his website. I’ll let the man explain himself.
Recently I have been sent, have enjoyed and have reposted lots of filmic mash ups and montages. Some of them by editors as young as nineteen, such as Joel Walden who gave us this most recently.
The montages I’m sent make me a little nostalgic, because that’s exactly what I was doing at age 19. In between making amateur no budget films as a teen, I’d teach myself to edit by cutting together montages of movie clips on a theme. You might have heard me talking to Kevin Smith about it on a recent podcast.
The following clip I edited together while at Bournemouth Art College. Way before I’d ever seen an Avid suite, this was done over some long weekends locked in a VHS tape to tape editing suite. Yes, VHS!
So if you are wondering about the low quality of the sound and visuals in the following montage, there’s a simple answer. All of the clips were sourced from either films I’ve recorded off the TV, sell thru VHS tapes I had bought and also films that happened to be in the college library. I literally had piles of VHS tapes in the edit suite. So that explains some of the glitchy clips.
As for the audio edits, hey it was VHS and I was 19. This is the first time I used a ‘real’ editing suite.
So cast your minds back to the last century and see how I misspent my youth; cutting together bullet ballets to John Lennon’s melodic attack on the NRA.
I give you my 1993 mash up; ‘Gun Fetish’.
Beware: This is a little NSFW and spoiler heavy.
Before any of you comment “Where’s —– or ——”, bear in mind that the 19 year old me had a limited supply of tapes at the time. Most of these are oneS I copied off the telly.