Stewart Home b. 1962
Baked Bean Junkie Gross Out (1986)
Duration: 6'57"
The avant-garde art of boredom taken to new extremes back in 1986! A Neoist anti-classic! I performed for the camera and immediately after shooting I recorded the voice over in one take, sounding about as sincere as a snake oil salesman. Pete Horobin shot this and nearly all the edits are in camera because we didn't have free access to proper edit suites at the time and tried to minimise whatever time we paid for. Any visual edits we made to what we did were crashed between a domestic machine and the camera, cruder than editing Super 8, hence our preference for in camera editing - and not even a master of multi-tasking like me was able to perform and simultaneously do in camera editing. That said VHS film was cheaper to the superior looking 8mm celluloid and enabled us impoverished dole queue 'aesthetes' to shoot a lot more 'film'. As a result we didn't title this piece or much other material at the time, the titles and credits were added just before I put this up here, but the rest of the visuals are exactly as we left them 21 years ago. I didn't bother showing this anywhere at the time, but on reviewing it recently I realised I was making YouTube type shorts a couple of decades before most of you; it just looks different because we had clunky VHS cameras then, not digital... but the 'spirit' is the same. And please note the sacrifices I make for aesthetic effect; I even drink a can of Coke in this (well it looks like I did, but actually I poured the crud inside the can away and replaced it with water - couldn't have got away with that using a bottle). And dig the Wm Low baked bean tin, a supermarket that could be found around Scottish north east back in the eighties but that disappeared a decade or probably more ago...
RESOURCES:
Stewart Home on UbuWeb Sound