NYU

Don Pavlish and I made this for our NYU Film and TV thesis in 1997. We were a little ahead of the curve, or at least ahead of the infrastructure: alongside the show itself there was a companion website, a set of chat bots, and blogs written in the voices of the characters. A decade later that sort of thing would get a name and a budget line. At the time it mostly just got puzzled looks.

The tape has not aged gracefully, and the whole thing arrives here in four parts. Apologies on both counts. The show holds up better than the encoding does.

Don Pavlish and I put this together for Sight and Sound in 1995, back in the NYU film days. It won a couple of awards at the time, and looking at it now I still think it is some of the better work I did in those years. The ideas were there, and so was the timing.

What has not held up is the video itself. Analog was analog, and every pass through a tape deck took its cut. Watching it today is a good reminder of how much we simply put up with before everything went digital, and how little any of it seemed to bother us at the time.