The Grad School Diaries: The Film School Digression

So why am I sitting in the elevator lobby of our Department’s floor with my friend and counterpart from the OB/Micro side our discipline and a borrowed video camera on a tripod, waiting for a pack of diminutive young Asian women to stop giggling and press the “door open” button? Well, it’s kind of a long story…

As previously noted, a few weeks ago we found out that, by recent but hallowed tradition, the first year doctoral students are required to provide the entertainment at the Department’s Holiday party every year. This has apparently had mixed results over the years; some of the groups have been small enough to get by with just two individual performances, while others have been collective. Some of the attempts have been deathly boring, while others were so ill-advised that there are some resentments over them that still linger, even to this day. The potential for disaster is huge, and the best we can hope for is to pass inoffensively into obscurity…

Which will not be easy for a group that includes only two native speakers, plus three Chinese, a Korean and an Albanian. The addition of the two transfer students (considered to be first-years for the purposes of this exercise – that’s the Chairman’s official decision) gives us 5 diminutive women and two very large white guys, none of whom can sing, dance, or play any known instruments. We settled early on some type of dramatic production, since all of us can at least memorize and recite lines; almost immediately we decided to videotape the whole exercise, since that would lower the pressure on everybody, and increase our chance of pulling this off. But that still left the question of what to do…

I ran the idea past my wife and the kids, and they came up with the idea of a dramatic reading, with the members of the cohort acting out parts of the story. I’m not sure who suggested “A Visit from St. Nicholas” as the dramatic reading, but the cohort all liked the idea, and we quickly brainstormed up different things for all of us to be doing on-screen while the poem is being read. With only two males – and only two native speakers – available, it came down to my counterpart and I to take on the roles of Narrator (e.g. the one reading the actual poem in real-time) and Santa himself…

It was a toss-up, but while we’re equally matched as public speakers, I’m slightly better at interpretive reading, while my friend is by far and away the better actor. Therefore we agreed that I’d be the one reading aloud at the party, and he’d get to be Santa on the screen. He also agreed to edit the video, but with modern software (and a stone-axe-simple storyboard to work from) our other Large White Guy (LWG?) insists this won’t be difficult. It leaves me as the only one who has to perform in public, and unfortunately gives the impression that I’m somehow in charge of this mutual insanity, which could hardly be further from the truth. But such are the fortunes of war; we’ve all got to make this work or suffer the consequences. Assuming we can manage to film the thing, of course…

Our interpretation of the poem involves Santa coming to our building and walking through our Department offices, granting wishes, leaving candy canes, and so on. We’ve worked out and filmed sight gags for every member of the cast, and now we just have to show how our hero gets onto and off of the floor. So we’ve got a scene where people off-camera are waving pictures of various animals on the end of long sticks, representing Santa’s reindeer, and we’re getting a shot of this happening onboard the elevator, which is our interpretation of Santa’s team waiting for the big man to return to the sleigh. It’s going to look great on the video, trust me! Just as soon as one of our cast members remembers to push the button and open the door…