Back in early 2002, right after a shitty break-up, I moved back in with my dad and spent my nights making an alternative music video to Scatman John’s “Scatman’s World” out of photos of me and my friends and snippets of badly-lipsynched webcam footage. It’s full of in-jokes and if you don’t already know me then, well, it’ll mean nothing to you anyway.
Kind: Videos
Team CompSci’s “The Matrix” (Aberystwyth University Student Skills Competition 2001)
Until 2006, Aberystwyth University (then The University of Wales, Aberystwyth) ran an interdisciplinary competition for 2nd year undergraduate students to showcase the skills offered by their degree, by producing an educational stand and a presentation. Employers from various industries were invited as judges, and prizes were offered for the best stand, best presentation, and best overall.
Prior to 2001, the presentation aspect had typically consisted of, at best, a handful of PowerPoint slides and students taking turns to list off some of the reasons that their department was best at producing versatile, highly-employable graduates. But in 2001’s competition, Team CompSci (from the Computer Science department) changed all that, by producing a mixed audiovisual and stage performance presentation, inspired by 1999’s hit movie The Matrix.
A film shows a young Neo, unskilled and unemployed, as he’s picked up by the crew of the Aberchadnezzar and “trained” (using a brain-jack interface) with the skills of an Aberystwyth CompSci graduate. The audience then saw a clip of Neo ascending the stairs to the theatre, before he would appear on stage and undergo a job interview with an “agent”. In this version, the interview segment was (hasily) re-filmed and inserted directly into the clip.