12s Redux: Pattie Gave Me an MP3 Player

New Vanity clip for our videos

Adieu, 12seconds.tv

I've been posting videos to 12seconds.tv for over six months now. It is not where Pattie and I are heading with our creative/media careers, but it has been a lovely stopover. The site administrators are pulling the plug this Friday, and I for one am sad to see it go.

Video aficionados who want to know where to go next for their Pattie-and-Carl video needs might try our Vimeo account:

http://vimeo.com/carlandpattie/videos

Most of the content there is from 2002-2004, when we were living in Canada and shooting with a single Canon ZR40 [sic]. Thoughtful work nonetheless, I'd say, and not without scope and ambition. The footage from the Yukon and northern British Columbia in Free Way was beyond picturesque. The sociological bent in Cat's Eye is quite conscious of (and, indeed, addresses with delight) recent and promising methodologies in that field. And if the central principle of theater is that dying is easy but comedy hard, then the humor value of Lavelle and Ginny Visit Victoria, the two aureole-centric videos, and possibly the video for The Carl Wilkerson Fan Club Theme Song is at least preferable to dying.

The 730-Day Disabled List

I have an MBA from a school with a good reputation internationally. My wife and I moved to Las Vegas four years ago ready to begin a media business, a venture towards which we had accumulated significant experience and for which we were otherwise well-qualified. Before we could execute our plans, I became ill with what would turn out to be fibromyalgia, which put us in a financial hole from which we have been digging out slowly.


My illness has come under a little better control with a recent change in my meds, and I have begun planning how to live my life now that I am not forced to do so with one hand tied behind my back. While I was ill, I had a long time to think about how I wanted to live if I ever regained my former level of ability to function on a day-to-day basis, and I came up with some very specific ideas. The process has been rewarding, but it has of necessity been deliberate in its pacing, and I do not need to listen to long, boring lectures about how I became ill at exactly the wrong point in my life or what I ought to be doing now that it appears the worst of it is perhaps over.

I Am Not A Filmmaker

After a conversation w/P this morning, the proposition that “I am not a filmmaker” seems even more attractive. The beauty part of choosing video over film is that it works nicely if what you want to do is not spend 99% of your time worrying about how pretty it is, a hole with no bottom if there ever was one. I’m capable of better things. OTOH, the craft element of the craft is making itself manifest to me, and although I may know more than enough about, e.g., editing as it is, I feel strongly that if I continue to learn about it, it will broaden my creative palate. It isn’t so much that I’m going for a “happy medium” here, it’s that my initial impulse to say “Screw the film schoolers, I only care if it’s legible,” has been overridden by the fact that I actually know something about the subject now and want to delay making any pronouncements about the subject, or maybe even defining the subject, until I’ve learned more. So as pathetic as it would be to turn into just another “pretty picture person,” to be informed only by that narrative and no others, it is perhaps a naïve analysis to conclude that “therefore” I am going to have a totally nuts-and-bolts approach to the matter. I think that there are considerations that are present beyond and despite the film nerds’ approach to the matter, a multitude of perspectives on this very promising medium, and I don’t want to make the mistake they have made of boiling it down to the point that no really good corn can grow given what is left. I am informed in my film and video pursuits by a number of valid and rewarding narratives, and to pick one as supreme would be a loss of potential not so much in myself but, worse yet, in what I could create.

Victoria Nipple Count

VICTORIA NIPPLE COUNT (c) 2003 from Pattie Thomas on Vimeo.

One of our first collaborative efforts, the film is based upon the annual Victoria Flower Count -- an event in January when people living in Victoria British Columbia are encouraged to count the flowers blooming in their yards and call in the "count" to a hot line. The total (usually in the millions) is tallied towards the end of January and sent out to all the other provinces in the form of a press release that basically says "too bad you're in the frozen tundra, eh. We are happily in a Mediterranean climate here, eh. Ha-Ha." (Last part meant to be read like Nelson from The Simpsons.) Victoria Nipple Count is one man's quest to show Canadians and the world that it is possible to enjoy a Spring-like day on January 4!

LaVelle and Ginni Visit Victoria

LaVelle and Ginni Visit Victoria (c) 2004 from Pattie Thomas on Vimeo.

Carl clandestinely follows LaVelle and Ginni as they invade Canada looking like innocent seniors on a cruise ship. The plan is to follow, confuse them with site-seeing adventures in Victoria and then see if they will give up any information. But, of course, out-witted by their wiley ways, the duo return to the boat and sail off to Alaska with whatever secrets from Canada they learned. Foiled again.

(This is a souvenir video made of the 2003 visit from Carl's mom-in-law, LaVelle, and her friend, Ginni, who had a few hours in-port while we were living in Victoria. But a home movie would have been tres boring.)