The ds106 99: #46 The Thing in 7 minutes

Image c/o the great D'Arcy Norman
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.

The Thing in 7 minutes

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3 Responses to The ds106 99: #46 The Thing in 7 minutes

  1. Alan Levine says:

    Good Bava, good bava (pat pat).

    It’s an awesome assignment, gonna have to think about taking one of these on.

  2. What fun! Nicely extracted, Bava. I’d forgotten the Swedish/Norwegian schtick.

  3. Lisa M Lane says:

    Love it! A great improvement over actually watching the film, too. šŸ˜‰

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