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Machine Child
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2 votes)
You ever wonder about the poor, unloved children that dispense soda cans from vending machines or live inside the office copier, working hard for you every day? This under-reported issue comes into stark light in Jonathan van Tulleken's brilliantly dry comic faux-PSA short.
Shot in only seven hours, the film was made as a cinematography exercise at Columbia University's Graduate Film program, and was inspired by wise words from the filmmaker's father. He was "always telling me to say 'thank you' to ticket machines in parking lots," says van Tulleken, a 26-year-old British-Canadian who currently resides in New York. "This was because, as he rightly claimed, there were small lonely men inside who worked all bloody day without any gratitude."
Van Tulleken roped in veteran actor Kevin
Spacey to do the voice over "after I had sent him the
script knowing that he was in New York performing on Broadway and that he is a huge supporter of aspiring actors and directors," says van Tulleken. Without a recording studio, he ended up taping Spacey simply using a boom mic attached to a DVX100 camera and then later removing the background noise with the help of sound mixer Jesse Ehardt.
As an Oxford University undergraduate in Psychology
and Philosophy, van Tulleken directed and acted in plays and co-directed and co-produced the popular short live-action/animation, "The Unsteady Chough," based on a poem
by Monty Python's Terry Jones. Currently, Van Tulleken is diligently focused on "building up a reel of extremely short comedy pieces that attempt to combine
humor along with highly polished images," he says. Apparently, the hard work is paying off. One of his latest shorts "Bumblebee" was recently accepted
into the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.
Jonathan van Tulleken
Machines: They're full of kids
Comedy
1:39
$20
New York City
narrator : Kevin Spacey
photocopy man : Rightor Doyle
ATM woman : Julie McNiven
Vendor Man : Ed Blythe
Vender Child : Amineh James
Photocopy Children : Clifford Dixon and Danny Sulchai
Jonathan van Tulleken
Jonathan van Tulleken
Jonathan van Tulleken (w/ Ed Blythe, Jaron Henrie-McCrae and Eric Scherbarth)
Jonathan van Tulleken
