The Other Shoe is a 2001 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, his third, which, along with Metronome (2002), earned a mention for the Homebrew Award when shown at the Images Festival and thereby broadened his reputation beyond Toronto. Themes Time in the cinema The main theme of The Other Shoe is the cinematic perception of time, which is compressed or elongated into a singular experience, for which insight Cockburn acknowledges Andrei Tarkovsky. Cockburn remarks that the contemporary trend in cinema is speed and diversion, except in advertising where one finds many static shots: "We have learned that slowness can be appreciated, but only briefly; slownesses thus follow one another with great rapidity, as refreshing as ice cubes shooting out of a volcano." Cockburn is convinced that "longer attention span means greater capability of complex thought, means greater empowerment", adding that he is not fixated on "slowness" and that there are other means of foregrounding time, which he does with rhythm in Metronome and Stupid Coalescing Becomers, a "backwards time fantasy". Media and multitasking Cockburn was surprised to find that the finished film was as much about hypertext and multitasking as it was about his original intentions. According to the LIFT programme, The Other Shoe "straddles the line between media, questioning its validity on either side." The short engages its viewers in "the conflict between contemplation and multitasking," while trying to avoid "shoot[ing] itself in the foot." Production The short film was Daniel Cockburn's third following Doctor Virtuous (1999) and Rocket Man (2000). It was also his first widescreen motion picture. Commission The Other Shoe was a commission for the 20th anniversary of LIFT (The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto). Cockburn was one of fifteen film and video artists given cash and equipment to create short works "that would be personal responses" to the theme Self & Celluloid: The Future. Cockburn has long had technophobic tendencies, in particular of digital video as a medium, and has claimed to have created The Other Shoe "solely in dismayed response" to his discovery that the commissioned works of which The Other Shoe was a part would be streamed online: "That may be fine for some people, I thought — without (much) prejudice — but not for those of us who still relish the surrender of darkened-theatre viewing." Filming and editing The director's solution to the anxieties created for him