The Sailboat – MADAM (An intro to a very backwards lady) (Ep. 01)
This is the pilot/test episode of an experimental series I created with my friend Jessica Arpin.
Before I get into the episode description let me tell you a little bit about Jessica. I met her while on a trip to Spain shooting interviews for the second season of “A Fool’s Idea“. She was one of the students at Jango Edward’s “Nouveau Clown Institute”. At one point during the week, Jango decided to hold auditions for the cabaret show, which he was hosting the following weekend. It was Jessica’s turn to show Jango what she was proposing for the show. She walked up to the mic and began to set up a “sampler” effects pedal. After a few minutes she began to speak a strange form of gibberish into the mic. When she clicked the pedal, her voice played backwards. Her voice was clear as day and totally understandable. The effects pedal acted like a translator to a foreign language. Immediately, my mind was blown, but Jango was a tougher nut to crack. He said (in a slightly dismissive way), “You can only say the stuff you know? Right?” The audience responded, “Try it, ask her something?”. He did, she responded and the audience exploded! I then realized that I had to do some kind of project with this incredible talent.
However, being the nomadic performer she is, I knew it would be a challenge to get some time with her to focus on a wacky video project. A few months later I was designing an interactive story game called “The Viral Sockpuppets” and I knew that she would be able to create a perfect character for the narrative. It just so happened that she was planing a trip to the New Orleans Fringe Festival for a few days and in-between performances she would have some time to play with video stuff! I quickly hopped on a plane and went down to the land of beignets and chicory coffee. The first break we got happened to be on a sailboat ride in “Lake Pontchartrain”. This is what we did.
(Remember while watching, everything you see in the video was performed backwards, then reversed in post and nothing was scripted.)
For more stuff from Jessica please visit: http://jessicaarpin.com/
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Featuring:
Jessica Arpin
Directed by
Brian A. Bernhard
Videography by
Brian A. Bernhard
Edited by
Brian A. Bernhard
Produced by
Blight Productions