The Blue Box

Here's another home video clip of me, my sisters, and my cousin attempting one of those "turn off the camera to make it seem like someone disappeared!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" "tricks."



In case you have trouble following the "plot," allow me to help you out. First, two little girls get into THE SAME Rubbermaid. What??? How do they fit in there? Then I flex my 9 year old girl muscles to show that I am really strong, and pick up the box and walk away with it. Then, while I am out of the room putting dolls in the box, my grandma is practicing her line dancing. Then, I come back and there are dolls in the box... the viewer is supposed to believe that the little girls have turned into dolls but clearly I just put them in when I was out of the room... not the best thought-through illusion. Anyway then the dolls turn back into kids and the two girls come out of the box (HOW did they both fit in there?????). Then all of the actors and one of the production assistants bow.

The backstory behind why I produced this amazing video is as follows. A year or two earlier, on a rainy weekend afternoon, my dad had the idea to create a similar video but with much higher production value (i.e. using a tripod and not having the camera shut off while people were still in the shot so you actually couldn't tell when the camera turned off and on). As kids, my sisters and I (especially me though) ALWAYS dreamed of someday appearing on America's Funniest Home Videos and this might just have been our ticket to 30 seconds of fame. It was actually a good video, at least good compared to this one. However as we were just wrapping up filming (I know a lot of film production phrases BTW) the tripod fell over and the camera broke.

My parents took the camera to Sears to get fixed and it WAS fixed in about two weeks, however the tape with the video on it had been in the camera and the Sears peeps took it out and lost it. I was devastated and over the next few years tried to recreate the illusion but I think the first time was the charm - the family never could get excited about making another video and our chances to be featured on AFV were lost forever.