Image credit: D’Arcy Norman’s brilliant Minimalist Travel Poster
Back in January Lisa M. Lane came up with an awesome assignment for ds106radio which was basically to turn a movie into good radio. What this entails is taking key parts of a film’s soundtrack (music, dialogue, sound effects, etc.) and compressing it into a tight, somewhat cohesive version of the story—at least that is how I read it. She did a 7 minute version of Three Days of the Condor, and it blew my mind. Ever since hearing Lisa’s example I’ve been dying to do a version for John Carpenter’s The Thing, but between one thing and another it fell by the wayside, even though I had ripped all the audio from the film and cut it up into 45 separate tracks back in February. This morning I went through those tracks and cut them up into a 7 minute version for ds106radio. It is by no means perfect, but doing it was a ton of fun. I tried to preserve some of the humor of the film (MacReady’s calling the Norwegians Swedes, etc.) while capturing what I believe to be the overarching horror of the film: nobody can trust anyone else anymore. I changed the ending a bit, or at least added on to it—the only moment of real license on my part—but the rest simply tries to distill the plot of The Thing into seven short minutes. Not sure I totally succeeded, but it felt good to make it. What’s more, it should count as the first of my May Day Stories.
Good Bava, good bava (pat pat).
It’s an awesome assignment, gonna have to think about taking one of these on.
What fun! Nicely extracted, Bava. I’d forgotten the Swedish/Norwegian schtick.
Love it! A great improvement over actually watching the film, too. š