Interview: Count Zero

When I set out on this whole "BBS Documentary" project, it had been almost a decade since I had touched audiovisual equipment on this scale, and I'd certainly never tried a project as huge and involved as this one. I knew that whoever the first interview was was going to have to basically put up with delays, weird-acting equipment, and my own stumbling attempts to organize a good shot. To that end, I decided that this person should be someone I knew, someone familiar with being interviewed on camera, and someone located nearby in case I wanted to come back later and try again. The person who fit this bill was Count Zero. He got (and still occasionally gets) a lot of press and media attention being a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, and so I wasn't worried about him freezing up or acting differently just because there was a camera in the room. We were friends going way back, so there wasn't going to be any discomfort or weirdness asking about his past, and I also therefore knew my subject well. Compared to later interviews, I completely overworked the lighting in the shot, adding all three of my lights in and carefully arranging them in an "artistic" fashion. I also found out the hard way how not to set up a light when it started to smoke quite noticably after a few minutes. Actually, it was the small screen one puts in front of the bulb burning off my oils, but the place smelled a tad funny after that. Count Zero had a great apartment to film in, a stunning room with spiral staircase and bizarre creatures, both stuffed and living. It's not quite noticable in a lot of the video footage, but the whole time he's talking, he has a very large millipede on his left arm. He also has a stuffed coyote named "Woofy" in the background as well. This interview has a lot of the natures of the first few interviews: overshooting (2 and a half hours of footage), sub-optimal sound (I was still shooting with the onboard mic, so this is one of the few interviews shot in