Roy Votes (1 min. 2001) Shot, directed, and edited by Lester Alfonso. A deleted scene from a film shot in the Philippines shows how voting is done.
Day 15 of 360 videos from my archive. Today’s video was shot in the Philippines back in 1998. I was shooting a film that ended up becoming the award-winning Trying to Be Some Kind of Hero, a personal project that ended up opening many professional doors for me. Primarily, I think, it’s because of my evident skill in editing.
Roy Votes is a deleted scene that didn’t make it into the Special Edition extra features, it’s my delight to publish it here for the first time. I hope my cousin Roy enjoys this trip down memory lane. It opens it up for me to relate a story about the making of the film that many have not heard.
It’s not widely known that Trying to be Some Kind of Hero (a film documenting the search for the truth about my missing American grandfather) previously went by many other working titles including Birth Day, PIX, and Thirty One-Minute Movies About a Mystery.
When I finally sat down to edit the footage I shot in the Philippines in 2001, I began with the idea of making minute-long segments, no more, no less, about each of the thirty topics I had counted in my notebook.
At the time, I was obsessed with the idea of making a movie that would be the result of a playlist of scenes that would make sense in any order. To me, this was clearly a project made for the internet. I was an early joiner of CBC’s cross-platform experiment ZeD but it would still take years for the technology to catch up to what I was really proposing.
Twenty years ago, no one had YouTube or Netflix in their pockets much less anyone making content for it. Even today, it’s a bit difficult to imagine non-linear randomized video storytelling but I think now is finally the time to continue the experiment with a more grown-up world wide web.
Cutting up the footage into minute-long segments didn’t quite work for Hero but the final product still retains some of those early beginnings. I ended up practicing and practicing how to edit succinctly and I continued this work with The Mixtape Chronicles where the style suited the subject a little better.
I present today’s minute-long artifact from the Thirty One-Minute Movies About a Mystery as a clue to what Trying to Be Some Kind of Hero once was. — LA
P.S. If you’re liking these daily posts, perhaps you can consider becoming a monthly donor for a year or making a one-time contribution. It would seriously help a lot. Your money goes directly into supporting an artist committed to continually become the best version of himself. Thank you so much! Much love, LA