Video Descriptions #2: First Impressions in Hell
Read the introduction to this set of texts and video description #1 here.
First Impressions in Hell, 2 minutes 22 seconds.
Reverb drenched, upbeat muzak fades in over a still image of an old computer monitor on a desk with an office chair. The desk and the floor behind the chair are covered with empty cans and bottles of Coke, plates of half eaten food, remote controls, DVD and video game boxes and other less easily identifiable mess. The image of the room is in a 4:3 ratio, but the video is in 16:9 widescreen. In the empty border on the left and right of the image, video footage of an animated starscape plays.
The title of the video shoots in from the left of the screen, ‘FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN HELL’. When the title disappears, Tammy, a white person with dwarfism dressed in skin coloured leggings and a tank top, and Daniel, a white man with long hair and a beard, dressed in cycling shorts and crocs appear over the top of the still image of the messy computer room. Both performers have their arms out in front of them and are looking around them to take in their new surroundings, with a rapt, amazed look on their faces, as though what they are seeing is beautiful and impressive, rather than shitty and gross. They are of course, not actually in the space that we can see. Though they have been green screened to appear on top of the image, the effect is entirely unbelievable, and no viewer could believe that they were being filmed in the space that the image depicts. The performer and the image that they seem to be responding to are clearly on two different planes.
The camera zooms in on the image, getting closer to the now pixelated cans of coke and leftover food. The performers are not affected by the zoom, and they carry on wandering across the image, looking amazed. When the camera zooms in on a half eaten plate of pixelated food, a sound effect of a crowd of people saying ‘Wow!’ plays on the audio track. An open caption saying ‘Wow’ also appears on screen. The caption is written in a pink coloured, serif font with a black background. In other videos, the pink captions are used when Daniel is speaking, but the sound effect is clearly not the sound of Daniel speaking.
The camera zooms in on the box of a Playstation 2 game. A time-stretched sound effect of a man with a deep voice saying ‘Wow’ plays on the audio track, and a green fonted ‘Wow’ caption appears. In other videos, the green captions are used when Tammy speaks, but again, in this video it’s clear that neither Tammy or Daniel are saying the words that play on the audio track.
This sequence of events is repeated for the rest of the video, over four images of different rooms, all featuring a computer and each horrible in their own way. The second image shows a computer on a rusty metal folding table, in a room with dirty walls and a thin mattress on a low, rusted bed frame. The camera zooms in on the threadbare mattress. ‘Wow’, says Tammy, via a different sound effect. The third image shows a small, windowless room with dirty concrete wall and a computer on a desk in the corner. On the desk is a folded bit of white A4 paper with ‘Sup 0 Chan’ written on it, perhaps in reference to 4Chan, an internet image board where the photo might have originally been posted. The camera zooms in on a very old, yellowing printer next to the computer that is covered in old game boxes and disks, then down to a waste paper bin full of what look like food scraps. ‘Wow’, says, Tammy, via another sound effect. The fourth and final image shows a small, breeze block cell, with a television on a crate in the corner of the room, hooked up to a gaming console in another crate. There is no bed, but rather there is a towel placed on the floor in front of the TV, with two pillows in the opposite corner of the cell. On one wall is a large chute or duct, on another is a framed picture of a smartly dressed Japanese man wearing glasses and smiling; and on the other is a chalk graffito declaring ‘RAYE SUX!’ Before the video ends, we get one more ‘Wow’ from Daniel, via a sound effect, before both performers disappear off screen. The camera zooms in on the photograph of the Japanese man, and the image and starscape background fade to black along with the music.