After getting 3rd place in the Gong Show three years running, I was a little fed up. I decided that this year I was intentionally going to try to get gonged. I had a piece that I whipped up that I thought might do the trick. I had just recently made the switch to digital editing once Apple came out with the iMovie software. To learn the software and practice the editing process I would capture clips from TV and play around with rearranging them and mixing up the audio. I would package them up as micro short subject videos, but none of them had any real merit. However one of them did wind up serving as the inspiration for Wasteland. From the Wasteland backstory:

I was watching the evening news, and as part of a story on non-lethal weaponry they showed a boxing mannequin being pelted by projectiles that knocked it back and forth. I found the image captivating. [...] I captured the clip of the boxing mannequin just because I found it to be visually alluring. It was only a couple seconds long. After mesmerizing myself with it for a bit I decided to play around and see if I could do anything with it. I slowed the clip down, made a copy of it, reversed it, and pasted it on the end of the original. I copied this back & forth pair and pasted it multiple times to form a repeating loop. I grabbed some audio from whatever else I happened to have on the Tivo at the time, just cherry picking things that sounded provocative. I pasted the audio clips over the looped video and wound up with a one minute and forty-seven second experimental video that I titled "Skin Shot."

I downloaded the video to VHS and brought it with me to MIX that year for the Gong Show. In a striking coincidence, someone else had a video that featured the exact same boxing mannequin, but live action, not recorded off of TV. I didn't wind up getting gonged, but frankly I don't remember where I placed.