Anatomy of a Shotgun

Recently made an over-sized prop shotgun completely from materials lying around the house and workshop. Main ingredients were: a long aluminium pipe, thick cardboard tubing, two toilet rolls, a clothes-hook, polystyrene and a heckload of duct tape. Constructed for no other purpose besides novelty and personal satisfaction, the whole process is documented here:

As you can see, a major triumph of mine was devising a barrel to load bullets into. Eventually I modeled a mechanism comprised of a toilet roll inside another toilet roll cut in crafty ways with a slit for the nail and bound together with copious amounts of lecky tape. Needless to say, I have never been so proud about toilet rolls in my life.

Unfortunately I can’t complete the final stage of construction. The original plan was to cover the ugly duct-tape ice-cream sandwich of a shotgun skeleton with woodgrain contact and some neatly bound electrical tape. However, a snag was hit. No-one stocks woodgrain contact anymore. Apparently it died out in the early 2000’s and hasn’t been seen since. Damn modernists and their sleek aluminium finishes, there’s no more room for rustic charm!

Also, having never seen a shotgun in real life before I had to design this based off Hollywood and this Google image of a shotgun. That being said, the main purpose of this shotgun is just for the effect and was designed to be a bit unrealistic or fictional anyway. Next time though I would pay more attention to detail.

This short film showcases the shotgun. Please ignore bad acting, poor editing, obvious flaws in continuity and overall low production quality. This was merely shot as the shotgun’s debut on the plasma screen. Was shot in time-lapse (1fps) then slowed to half speed in post production. Music is royalty-free from www.incompetech.com, but otherwise everything else was done by yours truly.

Vlogic: the logic of vlogging

It seems mindless and insane. To point a camera toward your face as you go about your daily errands. Buying groceries, walking the dog, going to a baseball game. It seems awfully mundane. Yet there is some implicit appeal to this very activity, perhaps some kind of intrusive, voyeuristic fascination? Or maybe just something else.

Case in point, vlogging daily. Its origins are a bit hard to trace. Perhaps it all began with Noah, taking a picture of himself everyday for 6 years. Or maybe with the weeknightly talk shows like Jonny Carson, Letterman or Leno. But now it’s evolved and hyped up on caffeine and steroids. Online personalities such as Ddairy09, shaycarl and charlestrippy, are just some of many who have begun posting vlogs of their day-to-day lives on YouTube.

What this shows is a new phenomenon, and something which I’m strangely caught up in. It’s oddly fascinating to gaze or peep into other’s lives. I felt moved when Charles proposed to Alli in Spain, or when Shay announced another ‘tard’ was in the oven. There’s something unusually captivating about daily vlogging, a logic which illustrates a shift in the way we’re interacting with each other.

The system of daily vlogging is to produce a “highlight reel” from the day before and then broadcast it to the world (or atleast an eager online following such as the CTFxC). In doing so, it’s as though we as viewers are living our day, week, year, our lives, alongside someone else’s. Our two lives become synced.

Christmas has just passed us, but nonetheless, this timeless quote from Charles Dickens seems to run true in the logic of vlogging:
“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Vlogic operates by demystifying one’s life (by watching it daily). It’s a bit pretentious to say that it unifies the human experience but, just like Christmas, vlogging definitely speaks to us through some sort of intuitive, instinctive wavelength. There’s a greater sense of cohesion and ’socialness’ created between two otherwise unconnected denizens, which illustrates the social possibilities of new media.

And so, the vlogger represents a new mode of ‘celebrity’… or rather, a ‘personality’, seeing as there is always a person behind (or in front of) the camera. Where the old mode of celebrity was built on mystique and mysteriousness, this new generation of celebrity is built on transparency.

papa-paparazzi...

Where the traditional celebrity is concerned with keeping a public figure private, the vlogger goes to great lengths to do the exact opposite, to make the private public. There’s therefore been a shift in the celebrity paradigm, from one which favors exclusiveness, to one which favors inclusiveness. It’s interesting to think what this means for how we relate to the ‘celebrities’ in our own lives.

And at least it goes some length to explain the appeal of Twitter just a tiny bit…

Thoughts?