Multiple SIDosis
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Former vaudevillian and amateur filmmaker Sid Laverents wrote, directed and starred in Multiple SIDosis, a short film from 1970 that features a dozen Split Screens of him playing a variety of musical instruments simultaneously. Each of Laverents's musicians displays a different character with its own costume and hairstyle as they unite to perform the song "Nola," a novelty ragtime number popularized in the 1920s. Coupling his own ingratiating persona, painstaking in-camera multiple exposures and complex overdubbing, Laverents created a film that may be amateur but not amateurish.
Multiple SIDosis was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.
Tropes used in Multiple SIDosis include:
- Film within a Film: There is another short film entitled "Multiple Sidosis" completely embedded within the larger film, which is made in the course of the outer film.
- Highlighted Text: The bit of the reel-to-reel recorder's instruction manual which inspires Sid is emphasized in this way.
- Hollywood Giftwrap: Averted. The gifts under the tree all appear to be conventionally wrapped, and Sid tears the wrapping off his biggest gift.
- Music Video
- Name's the Same: That "SNL" at the beginning isn't for Saturday Night Live.
- Other Common Music Video Concepts: Even though he lacks an actual studio, this is very much an "In The Studio" video.
- Overcrank: The audio version is done to create pair of Alvin and the Chipmunks-style backing vocals at one point.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Sid frequently changes his "look" when there are multiple similar instances of him on the screen, by combing his hair differently, wearing glasses, or putting on a hat. (Or Mickey Mouse ears and whiskers.)
- Performance Video
- Self-Backing Instrumentalist and Vocalist: Sid plays all the instruments and sings all the vocal parts.
- Short Film: Including the credits at the start, it's less than nine and a half minutes long.
- Split Screen: Up to a dozen separate images at one time appear on the screen; the method involved appears very simple and crude, being basically multiple exposures with masks around each individual shot.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Everything about this short film practically screams "1970".