DIY-TV is cool.

DIY-TV is cool.
Video sent by IrishHermit

Existentialist Bean and the thought process that led to this.

It started when I was looking for an audio clip from Armenia City In The Sky on the Who’s third album, The Who Sell Out. This is the album with a cover picture of Roger Daltrey holding an industrial sized can of Heinz Baked Beans with Tomato Sauce. As I listened to the album, I started up the Wayback Machine, as my wife calls it.

The Heinz beans reminded me of my father, a British Newfoundlander who worked most of his life as a fisherman. And like most Englishmen his idea of baked beans were beans in tomato sauce while most New Englanders eat their beans in a molasses sauce. When I was a child beans were a staple of breakfast in my home. When my father was home my mother would buy Heinz beans for him. And like a lot of youngsters who copy what their father did, I also wanted beans in tomato sauce. When my father was in port I got tomato sauce beans, but when he was at sea I had to eat molasses beans like everyone else. So beans in tomato sauce have a special meaning for me.

At this time I was thinking of making another video about DIY-TV. The beans made me think about the expression, “exciting as a plate of cold beans” as a metaphor for boring. And what is more boring than existentialist philosophy. Even if you are interested in it, as I am, reading it can be quite a chore. Besides, I couldn’t resist the pseudo-homophone between being and bean.

The one film style that epitomizes existentialism is film noir. So after writing some existentialist psycho-babble I video taped the first part. Popular culture visualizes the existentialist philosopher as a burlesque dressed in black while babbling about life, the universe and everything. The line, Ecce homo qui est faba, is from the theme to Mr. Bean with Rowan Atkinson. I used Adobe After Effects to process the video and tried to re-create the black-and-white, stark contrast, low-key light look of film noir.

To contrast the nihilistic look of the first part I used the second song on the Who Sell Out. Heinz Baked Beans, written by John Entwhistle, is one of faux commercials on the album. I used Adobe Audition create the audio loop and Premiere Pro to edit in the pictures of the beans.

When I thought of different expressions that used the word bean I came up with a pretty long list. I settled on these four because, to be frank, they were the easiest to find graphics for. The last section returns to the theme of eating beans. Of course I had to include the Heinz Baked Beans. The graphic behind me is an illustration of a 1950s kitchen.

The DIY-TV graphic is a parody of the illustration on the Mr. Bean American DVD release. The handsome gent behind the camera is Paul Knight, who along with Paul Reynoldson, is one of the founders of DIY-TV.