beautiful zelda
a fourth dimensional space warp brought her to me, oh yeah
the most beautiful girl i ever did see, oh yeah
she took me in her arms but when i held her, oh yeah
i was fooled by the beautiful zelda.
- bonzo dog band, "beautiful zelda"
(Pictured above: Volcano Todd and Jaimie Nakae.)
16mm film, 5 min., black and white, 2001.
Watch the movie online!
(fast connections only)
large-sized poster
starring
Volcano Todd as Kass | 
Jaimie Nakae as Zelda
|
with Mariana McConnell, Art Balteria, Steve Martin and Jason Porath
Written, directed, built and drawn by Garrett Gilchrist. |
Director of Photography and Editor: Maureen McG!nn!s. |
Robot puppeteers: Jason Porath, Colin Brown, Jaimie Nakae, Mariana McConnell.
Robot building team: Harry Pottash and David.
Still photos on this page taken by Mariana McConnell.
Music by Greg Nicolett.
Listen to the Beautiful Zelda theme at MP3.com.
By September 2001, Garrett Gilchrist's Orange Cow Productions had made many, many movies, as this website can surely attest to. But in all that time, Garrett had never once shot on film. You know, film, actual film, as in "not on video." That all changed with "Beautiful Zelda," which Garrett and partner Maureen McG!nn!s shot for 310 class at the University of Southern California. For this film, Garrett designed and built a dilapidated robot, and enlisted the help of his girlfriend Mariana McConnell ... and more importantly her roommate Jaimie Nakae, who played the title role of Zelda. That eternal snappy dresser Volcano Todd was asked to play the lead role after Garrett saw his performance in a short film his friend Rob Keith was shooting for 290 class.
This was Garrett's sixth student film.
It tells the story of an artist named Kass who builds a robot to keep himself company. A lonely young man, he is haunted by visions of a girl named Zelda. Can Kass win out in the end, or will the pressures of the world crush both him and his robot?
see even more pics in the
Zelda production photo gallery!
photos by Mariana McConnell
Fun Facts:
The film was cut and edited by hand, the old-fashioned way.
The film was scored by Garrett's Connecticut friend Greg Nicolett, who acted in the Dr. Fred films and scored "Excaliburger."
The class required that four weeks be spent shooting this five-minute short, which took a toll on the cast and crew. At the end of shooting, the robot was ceremoniously destroyed by the cast. Not a shard of him remains.
The following scenes were deleted from the final cut of "Zelda" due to time restrictions or the quality of the footage -
Toward the beginning, Kass is sitting on his doorstep drawing a rather bad picture of a very cartoony-looking space chick (similar to Garrett Gilchrist's art for the comic strip The Sugarhigh Crusade). We pan up and see the fully-built robot for the first time. (A subtle point was supposed to be that Kass' art gets better as the movie goes on.)
Kass, alone in his apartment, is wearing a light plaid shirt and draws a picture of Zelda (similar to the scene in the final cut, with a different shirt).
In another dream sequence, we see Zelda, seen first in the distance, slowly walk toward us before disappearing into shadow. Kass is again drawing Zelda, over and over (in a black shirt as seen in the final cut) until his mind deteriorates and he breaks his pencil over a rather lame last sketch of her. In the darkness, he buries his head in his hands and sits alone. Where before we saw his vision of Zelda, now we see just the empty balcony.
Kass and the robot are walking along when Kass realizes he is out of soda (as in the final cut). Kass looks over and sees a Pepsi machine, crudely altered to read "Mepsi." (The "Mepsi" joke was a favorite of the cast on the last day of a very long shoot. We were tired, ok?)
"I have only been able to catch Beautiful Zelda in its online form, unfortunately. Despite this fact, I feel I can give it a pretty decent review.
Garrett Gilchrist's new USC projects have definitely taken him in new directions. Beautiful Zelda does have its absurd points that can be related to Orange Cow, but the drama is what is really interesting and really good about this movie. I was able to feel for these characters, which is a hard thing to do in an amateur movie for most would-be directors, especially in a short movie.
Like Gilchrist's other recent work (and his earlier work), I highly enjoyed BEAUTIFUL ZELDA. Thankfully, he didn't make me regret the incredibly long download times."
- John Simpson, The Amateur Movie Database
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beautiful zelda
The film was cut and edited by hand, the old-fashioned way.