B&W 16mm film. 16:36min
Synopsis: A meek real estate agent thinks he’s found a machine that can solve all of life’s problems in this Twilight Zone-esque comedy.

Before I continue I should note that I’m not creating these posts in chronological order; there are quite a few shorts between The Ghost in the Machine and this one. I plan to give all of them their due on these pages before long – be they good, bad or ugly. And now without further ado…

The Impostor was my final film for OCAD. It was shot in B&W 16mm film and was my first with sync sound. It was finished as an actual film and as such I literally cut and taped it together on a Steenbeck editing table at the college.

Though it’s far from perfect I’ve always had a soft spot for this movie. I enjoy that it looks the way it does. I was aiming for a Twilight Zone sort of vibe and for the most part I’d say, with the help of my cinematographer, Brian Sharp, I succeeded. The plot was also an homage to Rod Serling’s classic show.
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Steve Markle and Jeff Kassel of the FX show Testees

Last Wednesday my sister-in-law alerted me to the fact that the FX show “Testees” was premiering on Showcase.  We were both interested in it as one of it’s stars, Steve Markle, went to high school with us.  I thanked her for the heads up and dutifully set my PVR to record the show on Showcase HD on Rogers cable.

The next day I sat down to check the show out and discovered that the it had been recorded but there was no dialogue track.  The background music swelled, the distant sound of traffic could be heard in the apartment scenes but the actor’s mouths moved silently.  Now I had seen this happen before on City TV HD but usually by the end of the first commercial somebody in the station had noticed the problem and corrected it.  Not so with Showcase.  I fast forwarded to the first commercial and promisingly the dialogue for the ads played just fine. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d mention that this site is set up to use gravatars .  A gravatar is a thumbnail icon that follows you around to different sites and is displayed when you make comments. With gravatars you upload an image to represent yourself and associate it with an email address. When you use that address to sign in anywhere that uses gravatars your icon will follow.  You can use anything you want, your facebook picture, your MSN messenger icon etc. At the moment, I’m using the creepy headshot on the right as my gravatar.

So if you feel like making a comment why not take the minute or two to go to the gravatar site and give yourself some representation!

B&W 16mm film on video. 3:58min
Synopsis: A cyberneticist finds out what really happened to his grandfather when he takes over the old man’s work

The Ghost in the Machine was my first short film. I’d shot a couple of projects on video in high school, including Macdeath a parodic modernization of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that garnered us the amazing grade of 25/15. The additional 66.66% being required to boost one of our member’s english mark high enough to pass. I still have a fuzzy copy of Macdeath that may make an appearance here eventually. However, these early high school efforts were all cut together using multiple VHS machines and as a result sported that odd rainbow striping at the beginning of each cut. Also the video quality quickly degraded due to multiple generations. The Ghost in the Machine, on the other hand, was shot on black and white 16mm film, transfered to Super VHS and edited on a proper editing suite at the Ontario College of Art (now called the Ontario College of Art and Design or OCAD). It may be worth noting that the tools used to create this film are all pretty much dead media now.

This was my second year in college and I was fascinated by machines and computers and how they might eventually overtake us. At the time, home computing was in it’s infancy (I wrote the script on a Commodore Amiga which was considered rather high powered at the time) and popular use of the internet was about eight years in the future. The college had a computer department and it was usual practice to go out to lunch while your photoshop file was rendered over a couple of hours, something that would take seconds now. So, compared to today, I had very little evidence that we had anything to fear from PCs.
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Well this is it… the beginning of my blogging career.

The fact that this blog exists at all is a bit unexpected. I’ve always felt that the internet is like a bunch of people talking to themselves. In fact, that’s exactly how I feel right now. That I’m most likely talking to myself. If that’s the case, I suppose I’m not really doing any harm so…

The reason I’ve created this blog to supplement my company site madfatter.com and provide a place to post my videos, showcase works in progress and opine on matters close to my heart.

Having recently revamped the company website and continued my commitment to remain retired from the film industry I’ve found that most of my short films and student films (with the exception of Love Connection )  are now internet orphans, scattered across the web on youtube and google video with no home of their own. As a new blogger my first chore will be to add these poor lost pieces of media to this site.

So without further ado I will set about doing just that… one last thing, I want to formally welcome you, whoever you are, to trevorfischer.com. I hope you will find something of interest here and encourage you to sign up, make comments and join in the discussion.

Please enjoy your stay.