If your anxiety is high today, use this brief, mournful video as a chance to reflect on the nature of failure and loss, and to possibly increase your anxiety. It captures an encyclopedia of moments of excruciating near misses and failures. A mechanical claw fails to snag a colorful teddy bear. A can of soda refuses to fall to the bottom of a vending machine. A basketball bounces all around the rim but just won’t go in the net. A fuse burns out before it reaches the rocket.
UNSATISFYING from PARALLEL STUDIO on Vimeo.
Set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings, the same music used in Platoon and numerous other films, video games, and TV shows as a signifier of ineffable sadness and loss, this 77-second video immortalizes all of life’s many cruel anticlimaxes. The video is the product of an in-house summer project at Parallel Studio, which has now launched an Unsatisfying Challenge, where, for a limited time, viewers can submit their own short films about “the frustrating, annoying, disappointing little things of everyday life, that are so painful to live or even to watch.” Winning videos will be uploaded to the challenge’s own Vimeo account. So far, no videos have been uploaded, which seems appropriate. One can only imagine all the illustrators and filmmakers quietly toiling to produce something, only to hear nothing back.