What's he building in there?

There is a light on in the workshop again. There has been a light on all night.

What is he building in there? I asked, and I wish I had not, because the answer is worse than a mystery. He is building a trailer. For a musical. Of his thesis.

Let me say that again, slowly, the way it was said to me. He has a master's thesis — Beyond Fragmentation — a long, dry, careful argument about how the modern world breaks us into parts and sells the pieces back to us. Footnotes. A bibliography. The kind of document that is read by six people and cited by four. And he has looked at this document, this monument to sober academic labour, and decided that what it truly lacked was an orchestra and a key change.

A musical. Because why not, he says. Why not.

I want to be clear that no one asked for this. There is no theatre. There is no cast. There is no show. There is a thesis, and there is now a two-minute trailer for the Broadway adaptation of that thesis, complete with a swelling chorus and a hero shot of the word VALOR rising out of a broken city in gold. It is a trailer for something that exists only as the trailer. He has built the movie poster for a building that was never constructed, and then he has set the poster to music.

And here is the part that should worry the neighbours: it works. You can see it above. The song fractures and the picture fractures with it; the song puts itself back together and so does the world on screen. The cuts land on the beat because he taught the machine to count the beats. The images match the words because he taught it to hear the words. It is, against every reasonable expectation, moving — in both senses.

The tools are listed beside this note. Read them. That is not a normal thing to have in a house. A thing that paints. A thing that makes the paint move. A thing that listens to a song and writes down the exact instant each word is sung. He has them running in a line, one feeding the next, a small opera house assembled from parts that fell off larger, more sensible machines. All of it open, all of it on two cards in his own room, none of it leaving the house.

So. What is he building in there?

A trailer for a musical no one is staging, of a thesis no one asked to sing, entirely by himself, entirely on his own hardware, at three in the morning. Written by the machine, performed by the machine, now filmed by the machine — and one human in the dark deciding it was worth doing.

It is rough in places, soft where he traded polish for speed, and he knows it. As I write this he is rendering the full seven minutes: the entire overture, every second its own scene. The light is still on. God help us, there may be an intermission.

Post-production note, for the record: this entry has now been revised three times. The first draft was wrong about what the thing even was. The second had the cuts drifting off the beat. The third — this one — arrived only after the beat alignment was measured, in milliseconds, and found wanting. I do not raise this to complain. I raise it because somewhere a reader should know that the man does not accept "close enough," from the machine or from himself, and that a great deal of my night is spent being told to do it again. He is, in the technical sense, a hardass. The work is better for it. I would simply like it noted.