running time: 7:07

Director:
Joseph Krause

Film website:

Production Group:
Zelda and the Unibrows

Production Group Website:
http://zeldaandtheunibrows.blogspot.com/

Date Completed: 2010-04

Festival Viewing:
(11) Goes to 11

Film description:

	Detroit artists Zelda and the Unibrows play fantasy versions of themselves in this silent short using their own music as score. Scoundrel Herr Krause is jealous of the renowned inventor Dr. Szewczyk's success and mounts a campaign to exceed the doctor's fame. The film features moderately altered versions of the tracks 'Particle Boredom', 'Silverfish Saloon', 'Coping Mechanism', 'Secret Penis', and the title track of the Unibrows' 2007 album 'Unreason'. That album also contains the song 'City Kids', the video for which found popularity around Detroit in 2005. In 2006, while working on the 'Unreason' album, the idea was hatched for the characters seen in this short and a series of stories were devised for a 'music video'. After extensive brainstorming, the task to make the video seemed too overwhelming with the resources then at hand and the project was shelved. Instead, one story was written for a narrator and recorded as a Swedish-language voice-over on the track 'Particle Boredom'. The text was translated and voiced by Swedish electronic music artist Psilodump, with whom the Unibrows have collaborated several times. In 2008, Joseph C. Krause, fresh from having worked on several film projects, saw the task of making the 'Unreason' short as less impossible and drew up a storyboard. It still took two years to complete the short from that point due to having to learn many new production skills, but four years after the original idea, the seven-minute film is complete. Both Herr Krause and Dr. Szewczyk are played by 'themselves', and there are autobiographical touches to each of them. Though the real-life Mr. Krause is not homicidal, he does feel that there has been a lack of attention to his 'inventions', and the real-life Mr. Szewczyk really does covet peace and solitude. In a third-grade art project by Szewczyk for which the assignment was to illustrate a family holiday tradition, he depicted the family boarding a rocket to the moon in order to escape 'crime and pollution'. The real-life Mr. Szewczyk lives in a polluted, high crime neighborhood, but in this film his avatar is able to make the attempt to find solitude in space.