Against Time

I possess a near-superhuman ability to ignore everything that resides outside the scope of whatever infatuation currently occupies my mind grapes. This is an amazing trait to have if your day job is to dictate, in exhausting detail, exactly what a computer should do but becomes a burden when nearly everyone you care about wonders why your focus is eternally elsewhere. I, like the protagonist in the attached, would do just fine in a post-apocalyptic lonerverse as long as I had something to focus my obsessive attention on.

In my pre-dad anxiety I told a good friend, in near tears, that I was terrified of being a bad father. His response was, “As long as you want to be one, you will.” Essentially, if that voice is consistenly in your quivver of instincts all that’s needed is to listen (and act on) what it tells you.

In the past year and a half I’ve found myself in many similar moments – though certainly less extreme – to the one that takes place at 4:24: typing away, figuring shit out and riding high on the supremely satisfying buzz that accompanies the Sacred Act of Making Shit™ only to be unexpectedly interrupted. Writing an application is like building a house of cards; you know, before writing a single line of code, what the final functional outcome will be but the act of actually constructing it takes a long stretch of continuous concentration.

When a toddler wants your attention it is near-impossible to do anything else. Either you are present or you are not; as someone who has been both a child and an adult I’m all-too-aware that there’s no in-between. But attention can be deflected and, in the moments when I’d rather be absorbed in me, my natural tendency is to hand her my phone (or some other suitable distraction) instead of seizing the opportunity to revel in the peculiar magic that accompanies interacting with another human life.

Luckily, that’s typically when the ‘be a good dad’ voice rises up and – even though my preliminary, lazy and selfish instincts often wish it would shut up – I force myself to listen.

It’s graduation film season and Jérémi Boutelet, Thibaud Clergue, Tristan Ménard, Camille Perrin, Gaël Megherbi and Lucas Veber of Supinfocom Arles have set a high standard for any shorts to come. Special mentions are due to both Nathan Blais & Sylvain Livenais (of Spectral Approche) for the killer sound design; headphones are a must.

ENJOY!

P.S. Our Supinfocom feed is pretty rad.

[ Contre temps ]