Camcorders and Hot Cocoa

[TheLeakyFaucet*]

(Open thread)

((Chad Klitou continued from Tommorow Never Knows))

Chad had never really been into ice skating. He wasn't sure why. It could have been the fact that he was hellishly uncoordinated and knew there was a pretty decent chance he would break a few bones, but the whole idea of weaving in circles for hours had never really appealed to him. The atmosphere of ice skating rinks was nice with their padded, rubber floors and staining smell of hot cocoa from the small lobby outside, but that was the point. It was just a nice play to chill out. Risk-taking of all kinds had frightened Chad since he was little, and that included ice skating.

He wasn't really in a good mood to begin with either. His encounter in the mall court with Patrick Fischer only about an hour ago really hadn't gone that well. In fact, it had gone downright horrible considering how he'd trashed the kid's sketchbook and then made the socially awkward invitation of asking him if he wanted to go smoke weed with him. Still, it looked like he took it well. And you gotta move on....

Standing by the chain-linked fence that surrounded the rink, he watched as a handful of people weaved and circled around the ice on their skates. They're all in center-frame. Good shot. Reaching to his side, he unzipped the camera bag that he had clipped to his belt. After rummaging through it for a moment and unclipping a few ropes he'd tied around it, Chad shoved his hand into the strap of his camera and pulled it out.

His videos dealt with very abstract messages. This was understandable, considering he did most of the editing when he was high. But with no clear plot, his movies just seemed to consist of random shots that had no relation to each other. It was natural in his films to see a scene of a squirrel gathering up nights switch to a shot of ants being obliterated by insect spray. But his videos did have messages. There was no denying that. After all, he'd won awards for them. Half of the time though, they were just the artsy kind of student films that showed nothing but unrelated images for about half an hour. Eh, screw it. A film is a film.

Praying none of the skaters would see him and think he was some kind of stalker, Chad clicked the red button on his camera and started filming them through the chain-linked fence. He shook the camera a bit and dimmed down the lighting on the touch-screen, trying to get a grainy, documentary-feel to the movie. You should probably go gray-scale for that. No one seemed to see him. Cautiously, he zoomed in and got a decent shot of one of the skaters doing a figure-eight. Frost nipped out from under her skates as she twirled back and started the routine over again. He got another decent image of the mist of ice that had shot out after her skates had screeched against the ice. Oh man, this is going to look great when it's done! Maybe you could even put in some cool effects later when you're editing it!

He started zooming out, trying to get the whole rink into one good shot.

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It went on for a good fifteen minutes. Feeling creepier every second, Chad kept zooming it and zooming out, video taping the strangers as they criss-crossed around the rink with the blades of their skates slicing into dry ice. Shivering and realizing that he definitley had enough of the footage he needed, Chad clicked the RECORD button and put his short-lived filming escapade to an end. Good. Thank God no one saw you. Who knows, maybe this movie will turn out good? You could give it a really good atmosphere, maybe. What's that called? Guerilla cinematography? You should have taken that film elective. Too bad it was full...

Chad stared out through the chain-linked wall surrounding the rink and sighed. He should have felt like an artist, but more than anything he felt like a freak. He'd just video taped a bunch of people who he didn't even know - if that wasn't weird, he didn't know what was. But there's got to be an answer though. Gotta go and find the answer, dontcha?

Chad clipped his camera to his belt and left the mall's ice rink.

((Chad Klitou continued in After School Confinement))