YAPC 2002 - The Movie

by gnat

At this year's Yet Another Perl Conference, I took my digital camera and borrowed Chris Nandor's TiBook to make a movie. It was shot and edited in the space of a day, with editing almost finished when the TiBook started crashing 30m before showtime. It took a last-minute firewire transfer to Meng Wong's iBook, finished 3 minutes before showtime, for it to be shown (and bring the house down).

It's R rated for Adult Content, lots of Adult Language, and hardcore Perl geekiness. It might not make much sense if you don't know the Perl personalities. It might not make much sense even if you do ... but it is an amazing testament to the power of iMovie. I've attached the script (though there was some improvisation by some of the actors). The R rating applies to script too.

• Jon Orwant does the Quiz Show at OSCON
• Casey West plays the Python programmer who is very out of place at YAPC. His main task is to look bemused, confused, stunned, perplexed, and mystified. There was an earlier scene in which I challenge Casey to get advice from 12 Perl programmers, but it was cut because (shame) I forgot to film Casey's side of that scene. This is why Miramax is not knocking down my door.
• Abigail is a Dutch guy who, for some reason, calls himself Abigail and is constantly hit on by people who don't know he's a guy
• Elaine thinks Perl guys are stupid sexist unsocialized pigs
• Jarkko has a nearly unpronouncable surname. At OSCON two years ago he said "Listen carefully, I will say this only once" and said his name.
• Dan is the Parrot designer, and an anime fan.
• Schwern has curly hair and almost always wears overalls. Thankfully, he improvised and improved on my lines.
• Simon just retired from Perl after being the lead Parrot implementor.
• Uri is a nice guy despite how he was portrayed.
• Damian is Larry's deputy for designing Perl 6, and his job involves explaining in simple language the (sometimes confusing) changes from Perl 5 to Perl 6. He takes pride in implementing Perl 6 things in Perl 5.
• Larry is a Tolkien junkie.
• Mark-Jason Dominus is famous for "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo" but most people don't know he has a long list of equally true observations. This is just a small selection.
• I am not a parody of myself in my scene, I just can't act.

 Name                    Last modified      Size  Description
 Parent Directory                             -   
 script.txt              01-Jul-2002 21:24  6.7K  
 yapc2002-big.mov        28-Jun-2002 10:20   44M  
 yapc2002-big.rm         01-Jul-2002 07:36   21M  
 yapc2002-big.wmv        02-Jul-2002 07:28   11M  
 yapc2002-small.mov      28-Jun-2002 10:20   24M