I had decided to take a weekend off. No filming, no editing, no writing. I was only going to go to my ‘Directing Actors for the Screen’ class on Saturday where I had to shoot the ‘North By Northwest’ scene I had rehearsed with Tina and Tim. I was going to shoot webisode three of ‘For Your ICE Only’ during the following weekdays and just relax for the rest of Easter weekend. But when my actors emailed me Saturday night, asking me if it wouldn’t be possible to shoot the footage for webisode 3 on Sunday, I had to get busy, found myself a DP and quickly storyboard the scene I had in mind. Luckily enough my brilliant DP Yohei was available.
Call time on Sunday was 9:45A but Mark and I arrived on campus an hour earlier. I wanted to do a quick location scouting. I needed a complete empty parking lot, a building that could look like an airport terminal, a hallway that could pass for an airport hallway and a tunnel that would look like a limited access, top security area. After walking around parking lot 3 and it neighboring Arts Center I found all of the above. I was ready to shoot.
Megan, Seth and Yohei arrived on time and after going over the scene with all three of them we were ready to roll. Seth, cast as Cloud Nine’s inventor Q.D., looked the part in his lab coat, while Megan, in her black dress, high heels and huge hat, couldn’t look any more stylish. Her costume was based on Audrey Hepburn’s in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. I had borrowed Diz’ huge straw hat, while Mark added the blue ribbon to make the hat look very Audrey. The final touch was the PanAm bag, which I had bought years ago for ‘One Note Too High’. Shooting on campus on a Sunday is ideal. There’s no one around. When on top of it it’s Easter Sunday, there’s even less people!
We got to shoot a lot in just about two hours time and before even seeing a single image of the footage, I knew it was going to look fantastic. And it was!
On Wednesday, the day before my last ‘Youtube’ class, I became my own cast and crew and shot myself sitting in a big chair, face unseen, talking to an old seventies TV monitor, in which I would insert a split screen mosaic of billionaires later in the editing process.
The week before, I had shot my friends Jorge, Ritambra and Kumar as a South American, Indian and Egyptian billionaire respectively. And I shot myself as the billionaire revolutionary. The whole idea was to combine all four characters into a split screen. The main villain, WWW, has a web-conference with four billionaires over the world and tries to convince them to join her in her evil plot. The first idea was to have a board room scene but when I couldn't find the perfect boardroom and get five actors together as well as a crew, Mark came up with the brilliant idea to make it a web cam conference. But an old fashion one: the web cam is an old 8 mm camera and the monitor is an old TV set. I loved the idea and was excited about creating all these composites in editing. Basically, I had to shrink the image of the four billionaire characters and super impose them on the image of the TV monitor to give the impression all four are on the screen at the same time. If you are familiar with Final Cut Pro, you must know that each time an image is super imposed onto another one, it creates an extra track in your time line. What’s bad about that is that each time something changes or gets moved in that time line, your super imposed images move as well and when you’re not careful, they end up all over the place, except the place you want them to end up! That’s when I realized why there's the option to convert sections of your time line into Final Cut Pro Quicktime files: the turn those multiple layered composite tracks and make them into one single clip.
Which proves once again that you learn while you play!
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