Sand Lundy and Helium

The sun has arrived. It took forever and with it comes the hardest part of my job: sitting at a desk in a basement for hours at a time. Productivity is rapidly hitting an all time low. A list of work sits untouched while I play outside…

But how I’ve missed it. The warmth, the smell of sun-kissed skin, freshly cut grass. REI.com has a special on hammocks and I want one really bad. My birthday is coming… J

This blog is normally about projects that either push me, or are lessons for readers. This particular entry might not fit in those categories. In fact, this post is about bad ideas. A lot of people tend to scrap bad ideas. But I wonder how you learn from them if you don’t let them see the light of day.

First up is the Sand Lundy. The original footage of Tim wiping out while running down a sand dune wasn’t planned… the Sand Lundy video that footage spawned however, was. Now, I’m not saying there was any alcohol impairing our judgment when we came up with the concept of a father threatening his child with the mythical Sand Lundy… But I’m not saying there wasn’t, either.

My old coach played the father and the lines were just thrown at him. I said go. 10 minutes later, I packed up and left. This video is funny to me. But I say it’s a failure or “bad idea” because at no point was this video challenging. It just is, and I’m very hesitant to show it. The camera work on the staged part was very basic and the VFX work was a joke (took me a whole five minutes… I didn’t even color grade.) but we at IE found it hilarious. And I guess part of why we do this is to make things we want to see.

Which brings me to bad idea #2. I’m not even sure what got this creative masterpiece going, other than us talking about YouTube videos and songs and somehow singing with helium came in to the equation.

I think the video speaks for itself. I’ve been coughing up latex powder since.

Moral of this story: bad ideas happen to good people. Don’t be afraid to laugh at your moments of impaired judgment. You might be the only one who does.

Keep an eye out for upcoming blogs from our sound guru, Tim Lundy (the guy who eats it in Sand Lundy, and the guy playing guitar in the helium video.) and there will also be some changes coming to the layout of IEfilms.net.

:) James