1992: ASH News Special Report: Too Much Rain

Date of creation: 1992

Synopsis: A farcical yet shocking predecessor to the great flood of 1993, Too Much Rain chronicles a brief interview between hard-hitting veteran news reporter Jeff Muddy and generic central american resident Nico Arocha.

A Brief History: As far as I know, this was quite literally the first documented video I ever made. It was for a 4th grade project on...something educational, but I'm not exactly sure what. Probably Hurricane Andrew/Felix/Henriette striking the mosquito coasts in 1992. i.e. Nicaragua if my cringe-inducing, pun-filled name is to be believed.

My dad ran our state of the art Sony 8mm video camera, while my mom stood on our deck and sprayed our umbrella with the hose. I made my titles with a toy I had called a Video painter (rev-depot.com/2011/08/26/v-tech-master-video-painter-v-tech-1994/), which I ran into the VCR and recorded the titles in-line. The b-roll was of my backyard during a particularly heavy rainstorm. If you squint really hard and imagine it as helicopter footage, it totally works.

Critical Analysis: Unencumbered by the concept of doing multiple takes, Nico Arocha was uninspired, stumbling through his lines and relying heavily on a non-regional central american accent to flavor his character. As Jeff Muddy, however, Jeff Geiss was the epitome of perfection, and in my opinion, robbed that year of a regional emmy for best news broadcaster.

Come Along and Ride on a Fantastic Voyage: The Introspective Nightmare That is the Cumulative Catalog of My Visual History

If there's two things Coolio and I have in common, it's that we both have a massive library of creative work that was the result of deep collaboration with hundreds of wonderful people throughout our lives.

The second thing, of course, is that we've both been blasting and laughing so long, that even our mamas think that our minds are gone.

The purpose of this blog, however, is to explore the first similarity. Every couple months, someone from my past gets in touch with me and asks about a project we had worked on. Whether I have a copy. If I could mail one to them.

I'm usually more than happy to oblige, but the harrowing combination of a hectic schedule, poor work ethic, and just general forgetfullness condemns their DVD to the dusty shelves of my office for months, completely out of mind. Meanwhile, they patiently wait, politely avoiding pushing the issue, likely due to their fear of my reputation as a horribly cruel individual with few emotions save for contempt.

My goal is to archive every piece of video or film that I have created or collaborated on, no matter how awful or terrible, and put it in the cloud, so to speak, so that anyone who might want a copy could simply download it digitally. This effectively eliminates me as the middleman, and makes it a lot easier for those looking for a dose of nostalgia to facilitate it.

For the most part, I'm going to do my best to post things chronologically, starting with the oldest stuff and moving forward, but their will undoubtedly be some crossover as I find things I thought I had lost.

So sit back and be patient; over the next couple months I'll hopefully have everything up, and at that point, if you don't see something I've forgotten, let me know! I'll try and find it!

One point of clarity: the only work I have a tremendous amount of access to is my own; however, I have made an effort to find everything available that Dan and Sean have been involved with as well, and I'll be posting that as well, it just may not be as comprehensive.

Chaotically Yours,

Nick