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‘...After all, there is a train of thought’

The wonderful and wacky world of 2005 Filmmaker Showdown winner Robjn Taylor
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Robjn Taylor

Robjn Taylor and I are sitting on the patio at Nesters talking about music. Taylor is passionate about the subject and is describing the merits of his current favourite bands the Velvet Teen and Muse and about how he enjoys shaking up his mix CDs with accordion music from the French film Amelie .

The more he considers the joys of mix CDs, the more animated he gets. Literally. He’s like a cartoon.

I like cartoons and I sit riveted by his gesticulating arms and the bright brown eyes that practically pop out of his head. (The topic of the literary œvres of Dave Eggers and Tom Robbins will produce a similar reaction).

So taken am I with Taylor and the zest for that of which he speaks I don’t notice the passerby at first, a mild mannered man who politely interjects: "You’re the one that did the 72-Hour film! What did you do to keep yourself upside down?"

"It was a sketchy wooden apparatus that I hung from. Very terrifying," Taylor replies with a winning smile. He’s not terrifying in the least.

"It was well done anyway," the passerby adds.

"Thank you," says Taylor. And he genuinely means it. They shake hands.

It’s not an isolated incident. In the course of an hour several other Nesters shoppers approach with questions about the logistics of Taylor’s "72-hour film"– a wacky, surreal piece still fresh in the minds of the 1,800 people that packed the Telus Conference Centre to capacity last Thursday evening. A good number of whom, it appears, shop at Nesters.

They were there for the finals of the Filmmaker Showdown, a balls-to-the-wall creative free-for-all that in four years has become one of the most popular and anticipated events at the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival.

The Showdown requires entrants to produce a complete, 4.5-minute short film in a strictly monitored 72-hour period. It doesn’t sound like much but consider the filming, the editing, the original music creation and sound editing. Actors that have to be woken up at 4 a.m. to re-do a scene since there is no "we’ll just do it tomorrow." Computer glitches that turn a simple DVD rendering into a panic-stricken, all-night techno-vigil.

In short, it’s not something cut out for those lacking innovation and determination and pure moxie.

It’s also not cut out for those who lack creativity. Of the 39 entries only eight films were chosen by this year’s review panel for the screening night at the conference centre. Of those eight, only one was chosen Best Of Show by the night’s judging panel. Year after year the contest proves that to make an impression you’ve got to pack a creative punch into your 4.5-minute masterpiece that could knock Jim Henson on his Muppet-conceiving ass.

Which is precisely what Taylor did with the 2005 winner I Have Mytosing Cells .

The surreal comic film features a character played by Taylor as the unknowing subject of a mysterious gravity experiment, who uses a convoluted process of deductive reasoning to figure out how to escape through a hole in the wall.

To create the gravitational conundrum Taylor arranged to be filmed upside down while hanging forward over a plywood-and-two-by-four structure attached to ceiling beams, hooking his feet to steady himself.

Despite the perils of diving headfirst onto the tile floor below and a hangover-like headrush that persisted for days, (his upside down training program in the preceding week notwithstanding), Taylor persevered with his creative vision.

It worked. The resulting effect was a wide-eyed character with a Kramer-esque hairstyle that appeared to be sitting at a table, allowing for slapstick sight gags such as cereal and milk flowing upwards and a handsaw that flies into the air.

More subtle jokes abound. Taylor is wearing a bright pink shirt emblazoned with the words "I Hate Pink." A digital alarm clock at the film’s beginning turns into an old-fashioned bell alarm clock for no apparent reason. And at one point Taylor’s character places a call to a team of scientists observing him and poses the question, "Assonance? Or, alliteration?" then hangs up.

Taylor’s brand of Charlie Kaufman-style unflinching comic surrealism struck a chord and the Showdown audience went crazy for Mytosing Cells . The judges were in accordance, giving the euphoric Taylor the edge over the runner-up film The Professional Adrenalists – a hilarious and well-made mockumentary about the extreme sport of freewalking by Adam Besse, Alex Johnson, Gordon Wills, Danny Morrison, Dan Allenby, Trent Hopfner and Mike Lawn.

Taylor looked like his head would explode as he was awarded the Showdown’s grand prize of a Panasonic Mini DV Camera, valued at $5,600, the very camera he was hoping one day to buy.

"I was floored," he recalls. "I was really, really genuinely excited. It was great to have all my friends there."

While the Showdown was Whistler’s first look at I Have Mytosing Cells , it certainly hasn’t been the first this town has seen of the films of Robjn Taylor.

Taylor has entered the Showdown every year since 2003. His first attempt was the bizarrely hilarious Too Much Pistachio Pudding Makes Me Sick . Kept out of the Showdown due to an unreadable format, the film, and its not-so-mysterious buzzword "STREBLO," have since entered the local mindset after screening repeatedly on Whistler Cable 6.

Apart from Cable 6, Taylor’s films can be seen via the website www.crapneto.com — a hub for general snowboarding-induced goofiness run by local artist Mikee HK. Other Taylor films include 2004 Showdown entry A Cherry Custard Danish , and Prognosis Waffle Cone – his contribution to Heavy Hitting Films 3 rd Annual B-Grade Horrorfest last October.

Everyone in Whistler’s from somewhere. Taylor’s from "all over Vancouver Island."

He moved here in 1999 to snowboard, an activity that continues to turn his crank. He’s 26 years old, currently makes his living at the Whistler Youth Centre and as a lifeguard at Meadow Park Sports Centre, and says he has no plans to leave.

"I really just play it by ear," he explains. "If I keep on having fun here, then I’ll stay. And if I leave it’s because I’ve found something more fun. But I can’t imagine what that would be right now, so if it does happen it will come out of nowhere. As long as I’m having fun I’ll stay."

He’s been making films since high school, when he discovered that walking around with a camera gave him free reign of the school grounds.

Concurrently, he discovered the fun of camera tricks: jumping backwards off bridges then running the tape backward to make it appear he had super-human leaping abilities, that sort of thing.

Having made up his mind that Prognosis Waffle Cone would be his final film to utilize the backwards-forwards effect, he went looking for a new trick for the 2005 Filmmaker Showdown.

"I started thinking of other weird things you could do to try and make it seem normal, like going really slow and speeding it up to normal pace. But that seemed too tedious," Taylor recounts. "And then I thought of the upside down thing, and I honestly had never seen that before.

"I’m sure it’s been done. It has to have been done, because everything’s been done, but I personally had never seen it before."

Sold on the concept he set out to create a storyline, the challenge being that he would have to be fixed in one spot. After crossing "get a new pen," off the to-do list, the plot of Mytosing Cells started to take shape, eventually becoming the film that strangers have been stopping him on the street to discuss.

For those seeking a film career taking the Showdown is no small thing. Past winning films have made it into numerous comedy film, short film and mountain film festivals, and this year’s judging panel included Hollywood director Catherine Hardwicke, who was in town for a special advance screening of her upcoming Sony Pictures release Lords Of Dogtown.

Taylor says he’s excited at the notion of showing Mytosing Cells on the festival circuit simply because he’s happy with it and wants other people to see it.

"That was the biggest challenge beforehand," he says, "to make something that I like."

And while he admits that if Hardwicke happened to think of him one day and invite him down to try his hand at the Hollywood game he’d jump at the chance, he’s not necessarily aiming for a quote-unquote film career.

"Put it this way," he says, scratching his chin in thought. "I will absolutely continue to make films because I love it and it’s a lot of fun for me, much like how snowboarding is. So I’ll continue to do it for my own fun and love of it. What everybody wants is to do things they like to do for work. So eventually if I get good enough or to a level where I can make a living off of it, then yes, absolutely.

"Otherwise," he adds, "I’ll just continue doing it for fun."