Crew prepares to enter Cthulhu’s chamber. (Rough composite)
Yup, that’s a quickie composite done over coffee of one of the scenes from last Sunday’s video shoot. It’s clearly just a rough job created just to see how the green screen looks and it’s pretty seamless. That halo you see on the actors is the typical glow you get from the backlighting and eventually will be gone. Short of it is, if it looks that clean over a cup o’ joe, then it’s going to look pretty bad-ass when I put in some real time to work with the footage and the backgrounds.
The shoot actually went a hella lot better than expected and I owe a lot of that to Stevie and Makana. I’d been having issues with the shoot being a bunch of guys and in talking to Stevie, he thought the same thing. He told me he had someone he thought would be perfect and man, did he ever come through with asking Makana (who now plays the second archaeologist on the excursion). We didn’t want her to be just a lackey but an equal with Stevie’s character and that added a lot of fun dynamics to the storyboard we’d originally drawn out. I don’t want to give anything away but there was one point where she came up with one action that filled in this gap that left me thinking, “Of course! That makes total sense! Of course she would do that!” So she didn’t just “work out” she was clever enough to fill in some gaps and help expand ideas that I hadn’t considered. In fact, she worked out so well that her archaeologist’s role in the video is going to be expanded a bit more than we originally thought and Stevie will now be sharing top billing with her on this video.
In the supporting role category, the biggest hoot was Charlie. His performance as the Captain of the doomed expedition was nothing short of insane. I can’t do it justice but his narration to the crew about what he was seeing had me busting a gut. I may have to find that footage and post it with the audio…well, at least what is safe for work.
After we shot everyone’s death sequences, we shot a scene involving cultists and all I can say is, imagine Stevie, Clinton, and I dancing in our underwear and Clinton wearing a duct taped goat head and you’ll get the idea of how ridiculous that was. When the three of us saw the footage we all were hurting and crying from laughing so hard. Needless to say, the raw footage will be destroyed after the post production.
That’s not to say we didn’t have problems. We had one very big problem – time. We lost our set-up time and, as a result, the time that would have gone to shooting video instead went to all the prep work involved in shooting a video: cleaning the set, setting up the lights and screens, ironing the green screen, and setting up all the gear. The large majority of scenes had to be shot in a mere 90 minutes so you can imagine the frantic situation involved in the shoot. But in the end, we seem to have done pretty well given the circumstances. I admit that I felt pretty bad about having to schedule a second shoot for pick-up scenes but everyone seems to have been pretty understanding which is nice.
For all the time issues, it was still a lot of fun and that’s par for the course when it comes to making videos; for all the hard work (especially when you work with a good group of peeps) it’s a ton of fun.
Next shoot is in a few weeks. Tally ho!
