Warning - may contain spoilers

The origin of this piece is kind of interesting. I did not set out to produce anything of substance. I figured I would just shoot some footage to practice editing later. I was going out to chop some fire wood first thing on a Saturday morning, so I shot it from different angles with the intent to edit one smooth cut after the fact. It just so happened that I was stark naked on a cold February morning. At the time that fact was completely incidental to the objective.

I shot the footage as intended, but when I watched it back in preparation for editing it, I got a kooky idea. I think I was high on marijuana at the time. I thought that if I kept the continuous shot but switched up the background music every time I moved the camera that it might be interesting. I started playing around with that and I liked the way it was shaping up, so I followed through on it. I mostly just plucked songs at random from my iTunes library, but I did use the same song for the opening and closing segments, each of which ran a little longer than the others, and I put a little thought into what song would fit the mood. That bookended the piece nicely, and transformed it from random clips into a cohesive composition.

When it was all put together I really liked the way it turned out. What was originally intended to be a simple academic exercise wound up having artistic merit. The more I watched it, the more I liked it. I decided that it was worth submitting to MIX, and would make a nice follow-up to Narcissus' Kaleidoscope from the previous year. Unfortunately MIX didn't see it that way, and they did not pick it up. I wasn't terribly surprised, but I was a little disappointed. Admittedly it was nothing special, but I still throught it was fun.

In the end I think that MIX lost out. I did upload it online to xTube (which was my go-to site at the time for streaming material that YouTube would not allow), and it got a ton of views. On more than one occasion a stranger would walk up to me in public and ask, "Hey, is there a video online of you chopping fire wood naked?" It also remains one that my friends reference often, and will always be one of my own favorites.