Project 3: Confessions of an Acterror
"A saterror about an acterror who is oblivious to his role in the global War on Terror."



And welcome to Project 3 - the capstone of my semester in the ACTLab.  For this film, I chose to collaborate with Matt Dayton, an ACTLabbie veteran.

Building on the whirlwind idiocy of mainstream press and media (5.1 Surround Sound) that I documented in Project 2, we decided to take an "Inside the Actor's Studio" approach to a fictional actor in the many terrorist videos released by CNN, FOXNews, BBC, Al-Jazeera, etc.

Matt and I spent a couple days writing and the script and a total of at least 15 hours of filming on set.  The most challenging part of this project was the writing.  We both had a number of things we wanted to convey subtly and blatantly (i.e. the actor's ignorance concerning his role in the global War on Terror vs. the CIA insignia accidentally revealed during a blooper).

Towards the end, you'll notice a very professional CNN logo and newscast very "reliably" relaying information from the federal government to the viewer.  This particular scene shows that flashy gimmicks and quick-paced graphics are now the equivalent of credibility and integrity, when, in this particular scenario, you are well aware that the video is a fake.  Additionally, we chose CNN because it's a bit too easy to show the inconsistencies with FOXNews; many people are unaware that FOXNews and CNN and BBC and MSNBC and NBC and CBS and ABC all receive their news beats and information from the same sources.  The only thing that's different is Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Keith Olbermann, and Chris Matthews.  Mainstream media is now entertainment.  We have our Howard Beale (and then some).

The last bit of the newscast is frighteningly accurate in some regards.  News anchors will dangle facts in front of the viewer (i.e. two gunshot wounds to the head) and provide some absurd conclusion (i.e. suicide).  Media in itself is a soundscape - poorly asked questions, irrelevant bias, inflated and bloated egos, and the trend of acceptance towards "info-tainment."