When Shane Farlin came to Cedar Fest, he expected to have a good time. What he got, he said, was a horrifying reminder of his time served in Iraq and the possibility of jail time and fines.

Farlin, 22, of Battle Creek, was charged with disorderly conduct for obstructing, resisting or hindering arrest after the sights and sounds of Cedar Fest triggered a flashback from his military tour in Iraq.

“My situation is a little unusual because I didn’t do anything other than lay in the street crying because I was having a flashback,” Farlin said. “You’ve gotta look at things a little more gray than black and white when it comes to this.”

Farlin, who retired from the military in 2004 after losing an eye in combat, said his flashback was triggered by the sight of police marching toward him and the sound of exploding munitions.

“The successive explosions nonstop gave me the longest and worst flashback I’ve had since I’ve been back,” Farlin said.

Farlin has pleaded not guilty to the charges and said he hopes his unique circumstances will get his case dismissed. He said footage from a newscast showing him crawling on the ground before being arrested will prove his innocence.

“I’m hoping to use it to say I did not struggle with police and it was not an obstruction,” Farlin said.

Lights, camera, action

By now, most MSU students are familiar with Matthew Kirvan and Michael Watson’s work, even if they don’t know the two MSU juniors.

Kirvan and Watson are the creators of the YouTube.com video “Cedar Fest 2008: Michigan State 101,” the most popular online video of the April 5-6 Cedar Fest riot. The video has received more than 94,000 views since Kirvan uploaded it to the Web site Sunday morning.

“The whole time I was editing (the footage), I could tell it was going to get a huge audience,” Kirvan said.

Kirvan said he and Watson didn’t plan to create the video, but when they heard the noise of the more than 3,000 people in Cedar Village, they knew they had to capture it on film.

“(We) just grabbed our video camera and hurried over there,” Kirvan said. “It’s pretty much a guaranteed experience that people are gonna want to remember, so we felt we needed to document it.”

The pair, who honed their filmmaking skills traveling across the country working on a national marketing campaign for Zebranet.com last semester, have gained a bit of unexpected celebrity through their popular video.

Watson said he is occasionally stopped by a stranger who recognizes him from the video, and the pair have received an offer from a recording artist to produce a music video.

“I’ve gotten messages from people calling me that I haven’t seen in years,” Watson said.

“We’ve gotten a lot of really good response.”