Electric Underpants

For several years I’ve been teaching a set of filmmaking classes at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, OR. This year, in the narrative class, the big assignment was for the students to produce a web series. They were divided into four teams, with each team being in charge of producing one episode of roughly 10 minutes in length. To assist in the teaching, I agreed to produce the pilot episode which is below. Unfortunately, the production was plagued with problems: much of the footage was unusable because of a bad tape (never use recycled tapes!), there was a loud buzz through most of the audio, and some of the acting was, um, substandard. I had to rework the whole thing into 50’s-era training film style just to make it work. I included some footage from archive.org to round it out and it ultimately ended up being pretty good. We decided to use Nowhere Fast as the title to the series. The previous use of the name never went anywhere and it fits the subject matter. If you are interested in seeing all of the episodes, they are here: Nowhere Fast.