A New Narrative for Pushing Daisies

When the editing assignment came up, I immediately wanted to play with my favorite (currently airing) show, Pushing Daisies. As for a partner, I mentioned my plan to Scotty, who happened to share my passion for an undead girl and her pie-making love. As for the process …

Problems accumulated quite quickly. As many of you have experienced, Snap-Z is not a cooperative program. But once we figured that out, we had to set some parameters. We decided to limit ourselves to the first three episodes of season 1, with a concentration on “Pie-lette,” for simplicity’s sake and so everyone in the class could keep track of what was going on. Once we started editing, we realized that the thoroughly engrained musical soundtrack would be pretty detrimental to a radical re-editing of the content. 

As for direction, Scotty and I hit upon the idea of turing Ned into a serial killer quite early in the process. With all the talk of murder and dead bodies littering the scenery, it seemed the most logical way to twist the plot of the show. We decided to remain true to the format of the series: begin in childhood with lots of voice-over, transfer to the present with not as much, and include a voice-over recounting of the crime. We’d show Ned not overcoming his traumatizing childhood, and it turning him evil. The advantage of doing the assignment with a television series was that we had lots of cohesively thematic material to work with from each of the three episodes. Need a conversation about death between Emerson and Ned? Not that hard to find. Need flashes of Chuck seducing Ned? Also not hard to locate. 

The hardest part, for me anyway, was not forcing the material. I wanted a statement to the effect of “That guy we killed,” for voice-over. I could have made it happen, but only by cutting together single words from different episodes, which is not faithful to the assignment, or the material. In the end, Scotty and I managed that transition a way much truer to the material. 

So, enough talk. Here is our version of Pushing Daisies, “Two TIme Pie.”

Leave a Reply