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Day Job
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5 votes)
The hellish monotony of office work has been a potent theme ever since Melville penned Bartleby the Scrivenor in 1853. If Bartleby was killing time in a 21st Century cubicle, it might resemble Jacob Reed's Day Job.
Filmed in one wide master shot, Day Job records the lonely routine of an shlub (Alec Owen), who procrastinates by banging on various office supplies that surround him. That footage was then cut together to create a percussive beat.
Day Job is not the first time that unedited footage has been scrambled together in post to create music -- Norway's Lasse Gjertsen took care of that with his wildly popular clip, Amateur. Reed says that he hadn't seen Amateur until after Day Job was made. Rather, he got the idea from the same clip that inspired Gjertsen -- Michel Gondry's I Am Twelve Forever, which appeared on a Palm Pictures Directors Label DVD.
The shoot took place over two hours, and was made as part of Reed's Cinema 290 Production class at the University of Souther California. "We set Alec up with a metronome in his pocket, and wired an earbud up to one of his ears so that everything he did could be on the same beat, which I thought would make it easier to edit," says Reed. "I ended up only using a tiny fraction of what we shot, and at some point I'd like to recut the film to come up with some different sounds. The shoot was a lot of fun, because Alec is someone I do comedy with - he's great to work with, and he also happens to be a musician so he came up with the sounds very easily."
Reed's currently working on shorts for his comedy troupe Tremendosaur. Check them out on Tremendosaur.com or in iTunes with the Tremendosaur Comedy Podcast.
-Matthew Ross
Jacob Reed
Experimental
4:57
$30
Alec Owen
Jacob Reed
Jacob Reed
Jacob Reed
Jacob Reed
tremendosaur.com
