Out of Excuses from Bennett North on Vimeo.
I put together a lot of the footage I took on last year’s Writing Excuses Cruise and Retreat into a short (perhaps too short) film just so I would feel like I’d done something with the two hours of video I’d taken. During the process I discovered that a) I REALLY like time-lapse videos and b) I hadn’t recorded myself in any of it. So enjoy a lightning fast visit to the western Caribbean, only nine months late.
Oh, and as for that clip after the credits—I stuck it in there because I found it amusing, but in retrospect, I don’t think it’s clear what it really is. When we landed in the Bahamas, it was an idyllic setting with clear blue skies and turquoise waters and seagulls crying and palm trees swaying. Then I realized that all those seagull noises were actually being piped in over the speaker, either to add atmosphere or to scare away real birds or both.
I also was unable to include a couple clips of the Creepy Baby Room across the hall from my cabin. It was a door marked Employees Only, behind which came the constant, distant sound of babies screaming. On the last night, when I brought my camera to record the sound, there were no babies, but only the faintest noise of a music box lullaby. I like to imagine that those noises were also artificially piped in, perhaps to scare away real babies.
Bennett North 