Is it one too many times?

Recently, I've been playing around with this movie making software that came with this laptop and realized I could make my own music videos, or fan videos; whatever you like to call them.

The Lali Puna track, Past Machine, is one of my favorites on their I Thought I Was Over That album. The way it builds, I always thought it would make a cool musical companion to a movie chase scene, even though most chase scenes are a dime a dozen. The song begins, I don't know, blandly? Generically? Something like that. After a few bars, it starts to get frantic and there's an underlying sense of dread. The notes and textures create those feelings. The drums, especially the hi-hat and cymbal. The electronic flourishes, ticks and glitches. The way she sings, kinda robotic and emotionless but still melodic. It completely lends itself to cinema.

I'll go on record by saying Seven (or Se7en) is one of my all-time favorite movies. Utter perfection, in every way, including the chase scene. By the way, I'm going to talk about this assuming peeps have seen it, so beware of spoilers if you haven't and are planning to see it. The way it starts is innocent enough. Following a paper-thin lead, our two heroes, Mills and Somerset, knocking on John Doe's apartment door. The chase begins when John Doe walks up while carrying a bag of groceries and fires shots at Somerset and Mills, quickly turning the table on them. The whole thing ranges through the apartment building, veers through another resident's apartment, on a rooftop between buildings, back into the building, down a fire escape onto a busy street and comes to a climax in a back alley across the street.

There is a sequence within the whole chase that is just amazing to me. It starts when Mills climbs onto the fire escape ladder and slips. For a moment he is hanging by his fingertips, the camera looking down, the rain pouring down. Just that split second alone, is totally worth it, but there's more. The camera tracks John Doe, who is frantically trying to get across the street without the aid of a crosswalk. It's out of focus and bouncing around. Everything is dark and grey. It completely appeals to me and I love it.

The scene slows for a bit as both John Doe and Mills get across the street and into an alley. Mills, of course, is looking for Doe but Doe appears to be gone. The next bit is sort of vital to the movie. Doe actually stuck around in the alley, ambushes Mills and has a chance to kill him. He clocks Mills with a tire iron and holds a gun to Mills' head...and lets him live. And the film goes on.

For what I was doing, I wanted it to be ambiguous. Where you didn't know (if you had not seen the movie) whether Mills was gonna live or not. So I just had it fade at the scene where Mills is lying in the alley next to a garbage truck in the rain, and Doe is holding the gun to his head. You can see Mills mouth the word, "No", and then that's it. That's the kind of stuff I love, something that leaves you wondering what happened. Then, you fill in the blanks with your imagination.

Now, I'm not trying to say I did all this work and blah blah blah. I mean, really, all I did was cut up a few scenes from a movie and lay a song over it. Also, the edits are kinda lame. Some of them kinda jump a little, not smooth at all. So I'm not trying to take any kind of artistic credit at all. That all goes to director David Fincher and the band Lali Puna. This isn't me being a pretentious jackass (even if I usually am); I'm just a guy who loves music and movies, playing around with a laptop. That said, here it is. And there will be more videos in the future. This is kinda fun, even if I'm not good at it.