5 Second Films is one of  my favorite websites ever. I discovered their work earlier this semester and thought their style of storytelling was perfect for ds106—I was actually considering creating an assignment based on their films before I realized someone else had already beaten me to it! Though I’d give the 5 Second Film assignment four stars instead of three, I was still delighted at the chance to give it my own spin.

My favorite 5 Second Film, by far and away, has to be “The Sanctity of Marriage.”

Though my video isn’t remotely as amusing, I gave it my best shot:

My inspiration for this assignment was pretty simple: I got to talking about it with my little brother, and we started hashing out ideas for what I could make a 5 second film about. Somewhere in the conversation this script happened, almost exactly as it appears in the film (initially we’d chosen a dresser as the not-mom, but a fridge just seemed funnier). For anybody who’s wondering, I did do my research on this one: schizophrenia can cause hallucinations and make it difficult to distinguish reality from delusions. This might be taking it a bit far, but let’s call it artistic license, shall we?

Filming was a bit of a challenge as I was alone in my apartment at the time. I started filming in my room, putting the camera on my desk to film my parts and on the window to capture the dresser, but then chose to re-film everything with a fridge instead. I placed my camera on the counter in the kitchen to film me and the refrigerator, but filming myself on the floor was a bit tricky. I ended up balancing the camera on the door of our half-open dishwasher to get that shot, and the angled turned out perfect.

To get the audio of the fridge talking, I recorded myself speaking in my bathroom to get a decent echo effect (Audacity’s is pretty terrible), then uploaded the file and converted it using Online-Convert.com (if that website didn’t exist half my assignments wouldn’t get done!), and after that it was just a matter of speeding up the audio a little to fit the time frame. I hadn’t anticipated the change it pitch that would result from speeding up the audio, but the ridiculousness of it ended up fitting perfectly with the humorous tone I wanted to convey. I tried to find some sad piano music to enhance the scene, but I couldn’t find anything simple enough to not distract from the dialogue. In the end I decided to do without this time around.

After I had everything converted and ready to go, I dumped all of my clips into Windows Movie Maker and got to editing. I’d actually recorded a bunch of takes (especially of the last scene with me in the fridge), so I had to choose which one I liked best, then shave each clip down to just a few seconds. I had a friend with me for the final stages of editing, and she helped me settle on the best “I just want you to love me!” take, assuring me the one I chose was the funniest. In the end the film itself ended up going a few milliseconds too long (and my titles are a few seconds more than 5SF’s 8-seconds-per-video-counting-titles-rule), but I figure I can get away with that, being an amateur and all.

Once I’d put the final touches on my video and uploaded it to YouTube, I went back to the ds106 Assignment Page to check out a few other student’s attempts at this project. I was disappointed to find that many of the links to student blogs were broken, but eventually hit on Alasia Laureano’s 5 Second Stop-Smoking PSA and Andrew Johnson’s 5 second screamer vid. I don’t think either of them really took the spirit of the assignment into account when creating their videos, and instead of telling a story opted to simply “create a 5 second film of anything,” as Alasia put it. One of the reasons I love the stuff produced by the 5SF crew is that it’s all so meticulously planned—they use environment, props, animation and special effects, camera cuts and the script itself to tell a story in just 5 seconds. While some of their stories are more successful than others, the best ones (like “Sanctity of Marriage,” above) do a great deal of work in an extremely condensed time frame. I don’t believe either of the student examples I saw really achieved that. Perhaps to change this in future, the assignment description could be updated to emphasize that props, scripting, and environment should all be used carefully to tell a complete story in 5 seconds.

Overall, I’m happy with the way this film turned out. I may have made a complete fool of myself, but I guess all that counts is whether or not you made somebody laugh.