"Cancelling now is really unprofessional."
August 9, 2017 3:05 PM   Subscribe

The Privates They're a unknown rock band struggling to get noticed, but there's just one problem - the uncontrolled bolts of electricity and radiation that their music produces that keep on blowing out amps and starting fires. On the night of their first real show, they have to decide whether or not risking life and limb is worth their 1 AM stage slot.

Written and directed by Dylan Allen, The Privates is the end result of a successful $25,000 Kickstarter project, and stars Lilli Stein, Rachel Trachtenburg, Alex Herrald and Omar Maskati as the eponymous garage band. In his Vimeo Staff Pick interview, Allen says that a feature-length script is ready for production.
posted by Punkey (22 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
The label on the Geiger counter pleased me.
posted by aubilenon at 3:20 PM on August 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


That's the Ghostbusters reboot I never knew I needed.
posted by Leon at 4:44 PM on August 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


This was beyond delightful? Thank you??
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 5:30 PM on August 9, 2017


That's the Scott Pilgrim spinoff I never knew I needed.

I hope it makes it to a feature-length production without killing any of the cast or crew! I want to see more of that.
posted by ejs at 5:33 PM on August 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


This whole area here... it's incredibly unclear what's going on in this area.
posted by officer_fred at 5:57 PM on August 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


I like.

I like because it is so inside baseball for anyone who's played in a crappy indie band. The Privates sound like every other crappy indie band I ever played with (think Portland circa 2002), except my now defunct crappy indie band (see my metafilter music posts). The gigs sound like every crappy gig we ever played. The weird sci-fi "what's going on with this anomaly?" is an out growth of "Why am I getting shocked every time I sing into this particular microphone at this club?" or "why does Tim's amp always have this particular hum when we play as a band but never when he plays alone?"

Rock on, you brave musical artist-explorers. You are channeling forces you barely understand.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 5:59 PM on August 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


More please!
posted by Thorzdad at 6:42 PM on August 9, 2017


I look forward to the inevitable noise scene spinoff. I'm thinking an even mix of Dumb and Dumber with Hellraiser as the general aesthetic.
posted by idiopath at 7:10 PM on August 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


This was so good. I want more.
posted by curious nu at 7:12 PM on August 9, 2017


By the way, "Rachel Trachtenburg" is formerly of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, a twee-pop band composed of her dad Jason Trachtenburg on lead guitar, herself on drums and occasionally bass, and her mother Tina on slide projection.

What her dad would do is go to estate sales and buy the old photographic slides, rearrange them in a projector and then write songs based on the new story they told. She was the band's entire rhythm section from the age of about 7ish until 12ish, and then I think she formed her own band.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:14 PM on August 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Do you have any idea how many kelvins we must be generating to do something like that?"

No, no, no. You don't generate kelvins. Joules over time, yes. Not kelvins. Not in that context.

However. Given how much fun this was, I am prepared to sit on my inner science pedant for more of the same.

I have no higher praise than this.
posted by Devonian at 8:21 PM on August 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


Please check my sanity here.
I am not making this up.

[also quasi SPOILERs but my sanity is more important]

First time I watched this was on the Vimeo channel on my Roku 3. As soon as all four of them are in the room together, like 35 seconds in, this really messed up interference pattern starts to happen. It's like those weird GIFs you see on reddit sometimes where the background and foreground become pixelated and intertwined. It's the kind of thing you'd expect to happen if, say, some crazy radiation or something was causing havoc in your TV. It was borderline unwatchable, but you could just make out what was going on, almost like watching dirty movies on HBO on the cable-box back in the day. It was unsettling, clever, and Scanner-Darkly cool.

After it was over, I rewinded (digitally) to see if I could make out the words that flashed on the screen when the smoke detector went off. And then, you know, the picture was fine. Wait, what?

Ok. So then I watched it on my phone. No pixelly. Laptop? No pixelly.

Other videos on Vimeo on my Roku? No pixelly.

Without the weird interference effect, this is a cute short film. With the interference thing, it is sublime.

I think I watched a better film than the rest of you.
posted by etc. at 8:27 PM on August 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


That was more fun than I've had in days. Love it!
posted by ashbury at 8:55 PM on August 9, 2017


Glad you are all loving it. We loop back around to Vimeoi's player sucking AGAIN for folks without big fat pipes. I, of course, would not mention that if I was a member of said group. Dropped it to the 360p and it had yet to do anything past the little scrolly loading bar.

Also, why no 480p which is a decent res for slower connections?
posted by Samizdata at 8:59 PM on August 9, 2017


Got it working, sort of at 360p. With stalls. And then it mentions "Problems? Try Auto."

Meh. How I can do YT at 480p fine, but Vimeo is always a giant mess? Yeah.
posted by Samizdata at 9:05 PM on August 9, 2017


By the way, "Rachel Trachtenburg" is formerly of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, a twee-pop band composed of her dad Jason Trachtenburg on lead guitar, herself on drums and occasionally bass, and her mother Tina on slide projection.

OH. EM. EFF. GEE.

I remember the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players when I first moved to Seattle (1998). I remember thinking, "this is fucking amazing, but that drummer kid looks really bored, it's too bad her parents are making her do this thing against her will." Last I heard they moved to NYC to be not famous there. Just goes to show, if you force your kid to perform for your hipster friends, they'll end up having no other skills beyond performing for other weirdo hipsters.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:49 PM on August 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


"Do you have any idea how many kelvins we must be generating to do something like that?"

No, no, no. You don't generate kelvins. Joules over time, yes. Not kelvins. Not in that context.


They were talking about something they'd melted and or burned, as near as I could tell.

Melting points, decomposition points, and ignition points are generally temperatures, and one of the units of temperature is the Kelvin; people talk about generating specific temperatures all the time, and often do so in terms of Kelvins.

Joules is a unit of energy, joules over time a unit of power, and neither by itself will tell you the temperature a system attains.
posted by jamjam at 12:44 AM on August 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


damn, that was fun
posted by photoslob at 9:20 AM on August 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Just goes to show, if you force your kid to perform for your hipster friends, they'll end up having no other skills beyond performing for other weirdo hipsters.

Well yeah, possibly that, and possibly you will find you like doing that sort of thing and carry on doing it because you like it, no matter what assessment of your life a guy at a show once made by looking at your expression 20 years ago.

Probably one or the other I guess.
posted by howfar at 3:55 PM on August 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


people talk about generating specific temperatures all the time, and often do so in terms of Kelvins.

That's colour temperature, which is something else again. If you're trying to estimate the power being radiated by an object through its spectrum you can, but only if you know a lot about its other properties. Often, as in your link, colour temperature is largely unrelated to power but more closely tied to what electronic transitions are taking place. Colour is one thing, brightness another.

Kelvin is a measure of temperature, not heat. It is only a correlate of energy if you have a well-defined system, which in this case we do not - the flash points, decomposition points, thermal capacity and even general composition of power amplifier components and tape material are not widely known, even by those intimately involved in designing with and working with such things. If something catches fire in an amplifier, it's because it's dissipating too many watts (aka joules per second); people can and do diagnose such problems by measuring temperatures (although normally in celsius), but don't talk about 'generating kelvins' - it's 'that component is at 90 degrees, it must be dissipating at least five watts but it's only rated at one'. In the events portrayed. it is very unclear what the mechanism is for the effects noted - some form of electromagnetic radiation capable of the highly focussed and specific results is by no means an obvious explanation, and in any case temperature (let alone colour temperature) would be a very oblique way of referring to what is far more commonly known as flux.

As an example, the temperature of the plasma in a static discharge such as you get by touching things on a cold dry day can be 5000k depending on what aspect of the plasma you're looking at, but that's largely independent of the amount of power involved; it's how the oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the air behave during ionisation. You could say that you're 'generating 5000k', but you never would unless you're doing spectroscopic analysis - it doesn't tell you much (if anything) about whether something's going to catch fire or not. Having a 5000k event happen on your fingertip is diverting, true, but nowhere near as entertaining as touching a 500k soldering iron.

As for tape deliquescence without combustion while the unit it's in looks unharmed - is that even primarily a thermal event? Highly doubtful. We also observe a lot of electrical-discharge-like ionisation, so evidence suggests some form of energetic irradiation which, even if electromagnetic, is far removed from the infrared (and prima face from the visible) parts of the spectrum, again highly suggestive that a scientifically literate observer would be thinking in terms of energies described as flux densities or just plain old units of power (in both cases there are many specific types, none of which is called kelvin).

If the protagonist has the knowledge to make scientific observations (and she clearly is conversant with aspects of data collection and has the technical proficiency to repair amplifiers) then she'll have some awareness of the norms of appropriate units in mensuration. Plus, she packs a Geiger counter, so is both intelligent and curious, and it's hard to see her not having the nerdular desideratum of copious literature consumption.

But as I said, I'll do my best to live with it.
posted by Devonian at 5:04 AM on August 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


I agree with everything Devonian has said, except the usage of 'k' for kelvins. Kelvins are 'K' darn it. I have colleagues like that at work and I'm left wondering how they're measuring pressure in pico-amps and torque in nano-meters.

Sorry for the derail. I enjoyed the short, but was completely mystified about the effect they were generating. I'm not as good as an observer as Devonian, and had a hard time putting that aside.
posted by YAMWAK at 6:40 AM on August 11, 2017


Sorry about that, mmmm'K? It's one of my blind spots.

I am, it should be stated, someone who thoroughly enjoys stuff like Star Trek and Doctor Who, where 'science' is gaily parodied on a moment-by-moment basis. On one level (and it's a big level) I actually don't care tuppence. An indy band with a couple of guitars will not be channeling an actual mysterious physical force capable of making stuff radioactive and burning down buildings in real life. I love the conceit, but I don't expect there to be some neat scientific explanation at the end of it, any more than I'm going to find the atomic structure of dilithium crystals in a Star Trek script. That's not the point.

It was actually using Kelvin in the uncanny valley of "the scriptwriter knows enough that Kelvin sounds sciency and it has something to do with hot things' and then misusing it that got me, because it snagged my toe. Those dilithium crystals? They were originally going to be called lithium crystals, until someone pointed out that lithium was a real thing devoid of magical warp propulsion properties, so perhaps make them something that didn't exist yet. It's not as if there isn't a good way to write hand-wavey SF dialogue...

I think, at the bottom of it all, is the realisation that the scriptwriter doesn't know as much as they have the character know. While that's fine with Spock and Scotty, because nobody knows what they know, it's grit in the vaseline when you're dealing with contemporary characters with the same knowledge as us - especially when a leetle bit of research, or having a geeky pal read the script, would fix it. (disclosure: I have been that geeky pal... what, you guessed?)
posted by Devonian at 9:10 AM on August 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


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