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I Was Robbed

By oncptime

Not a lot of people know this about me, but…I kind of, secretly, passionately, desperately dream of being a filmmaker. If you take a look at my resume, you’ll see a fair number of projects that scream “video production.” They’re not there by mistake—I absolutely love video editing. More than editing though, I like telling stories using more than just words. I love creating brief glimpses into make-believe worlds that are occasionally fantastic or sometimes mundane, but are always borne of my imagination.

In short, I like to mess around, write stories, and shoot them out with my camera. You can imagine my excitement when I heard word of Florence’s second annual “Florence Fone Film Festival.” The premise was simple: a competition amongst American and Italian students in Florence challenging them to use the cameras build into their phones to make 2 minute films.

I’m no stranger to making tight little videos in the pursuit of a glamorous prize. This year, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners received an iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPod Nano respectively. “I can do this,” I thought.  It’d be easy. I’d sit down, plan out an idea, and execute it—bada-bing, bada-boom. And so I did.

This year’s theme was “water.” At first I didn’t really understand why the aquatic fixation, but a brief search into Google’s annals revealed that Florence survived one of its worst droughts in recent history this past summer. The theme was more than appropriate. Ironically enough, the weekend I heard about the contest, the forecast projected nothing but rainy skies. “How perfect,” I mused to myself.

Like any sane competitor, I looked backward to get an idea of the kinds of films that had placed in the previous year’s contest. A quick Google search revealed the first and second place winners from 2011—a year that saw “twilight” (as in the time of day) as its theme.  The videos were…average at best. Rather than tell any kind of coherent story, they were just random shots of…things. A person here, a streetlight there—they weren’t proper films. They were just kids with  cellphones pointing at things that might make nice Instagram snapshots.

I was inspired, watching these shitty videos. “I can do something better here,” I thought to myself. “I can make a proper ‘film’ and let them see how someone with vision makes a 2-minute movie.” From this Siri | Nonna was born.

The premise was simple enough:

A young man, played my yours truly, would awake to an insistent iPhone whose Siri functionality warned him of an impending meeting across town. Before journeying across the city, his iPhone would inform him of an update to the Siri program expanding its language (and personality) profiles. Being in Italy, the young man would choose the Italian profile whose familiarity with the city might get him to his destination faster. Much to his surprise however, his “Siri” would become “Nonna” Italian for (Grandmother) a personality that while familiar with Florentine streets, was much more fixated on showing him around the city, making sure he was eating enough, and trying to ensure that she would give her grandchildren someday.

My video had a story, a plot, a bit of humor, and of course—water. During the shooting of my piece—I lost a piece of hardware. I lost lost my real phone a few days after coming to Florence and had been making due with Skype and my iPod touch ever since. Following the contest rules, I’d set me heart on capturing the whole film using my iPod. During my last day of shooting, in the pouring rain, my iPod succumbed to death by waterboarding (it got wet while shooting) and was never to return. Suffice it to say that my video? It had water to spare in it.

So I shot, and I edited, and I reshot, and in the days that I spent working on the 2 minute feature, I found myself enlivened by the work of it all. Though I’m a journalist by trade, I’d always found my passion in the editing room, stitching together video clips, and re-dubbing audio from specific takes. I was working my ass off to make this video but I felt so in my element. I loved the tedium and the difficulties and the unavoidable payoff of seeing the final product. I can’t even begin to describe the amount of detail that went into this shit—it was insane. And I loved it. I thought for sure that my dedication to the project would shine through and convince the judges that that iPhone was rightfully mine and that I was meant to have (and sell) it because my work was excellent (and I was in desperate need of money to get back to the states.)

I submitted my film both via e-mail, and in person, again hoping that my dedication to the project would shine through. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. And then the day came.

I sat there in the café/ bar section of the local Florentine library that the award ceremony was being held in sure that I was a shoe-in for first place. “This is it,” I thought. “This is the thing that’s going to make this trip worth while. Screw the Duomo, or the David, or the Arno—I’m going to win a freaking iPhone.”

And as the crowd quieted for the beginning of the ceremony, I heard my name being called out. Being called out far too early to be considered for first prize. I was third. Third. I was the proud recipient of a purple. iPod Nano. I might as well have been 15th.

They’d stripped the audio from my piece. The clever dialogue between the baffled American and the overprotective iTalian iPhone had been butchered. No one, save for old little old lady in the front row who could read the subtle text cues worked into the screen, got my jokes. My video was a flop. My video was an iPod Nano. I wanted to die.

At first I consoled myself with the idea that perhaps the videos that has beat me were actually better than mine. Maybe they’d managed to tell Tolkien-esque stores in two minutes that eclipsed my silly scuffle between a man and his digital grandmother. They weren’t though. They were short collages of water one could find in Florence. A rainy bus ride. A spouting fountain. Two minutes of nondescript stock footage focusing on water. That’s what beat me. I lost to stock footage.

I want to be mad, and in a sense I am rather aggravated. More than wanting to lash out at the guys who beat me or the judges (who legitimately seemed to enjoy my video) though, I’m struck with the overwhelming sense of regret. I’d worried while shooting that my concept, humor, and artistic style wouldn’t translate well to the panel of judges while I was working. My worries were justified.

So I sat there and congratulated my competition—who were far too nice to really be mad and, and I leered at the purple iPod Nano that sat there on the table as my consolation prize. “3rd place, 3rd place,” It mocked me.

“Life’s just too short to get hung up on you.”

Still though. I was robbed.