Doug's Sounding Board

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a group, among which was DVB. I happened to ask if he was goign to do anymore one-day film making like he did earlier int he year for CinemaSports in Santa Cruz. He told me that funnily enough, he was going to do one in two weeks in San Jose and asked if I wanted in with he and crisper. I told him I did and yesterday we had our event.

Last Tuesday we had a meet-up to go over everything and we learned that all our first names started with D so our team name became D4, and also is a D&D reference.

Saturday we met in downtown San Jose to get the ingredients that we had to include in our film. They ended up being:

1. Something yellow gets eaten.
2. A howl in the distance
3. A case of mistaken identity

We went to breakfast at Il Fornaio and wrote ideas down on index cards as a way to brainstorm. After we came up with a loose idea of what to do we went to the Apple campus to do our filming in a freight elevator. After we nailed down more details and a sequence of events we determined what costumes and props we would need so a few of us went to Long’s while crisper started on the script.

When we returned I made David’s name tags (one to wear, one to eat (yellow)) for his costume. Dan started working on dialog. Dallas started blocking out shots. David started making labels for the elevator buttons (all prepositions).

When the props were completed and the script done, we started working through the dialog so it would sound natural and so the rhythm would be the same when we filmed from different angles making editing easier.

We filmed 4 takes per dialog segment and dumped the results to the powerbook where David started editing becuase it was getting late. Meanwhile we continued filming a few other parts of non-speaking action. Got to use the fake blood for that and I found that today’s fake blood is far more convincing than when I was a kid.

After filming was done, the rest was dumped to the powerbook and Dan went off to throw together some techno and some droning background while Dallas and I cleaned up and helped David with the editing (he pushed all the buttons, we just offered input). We started nearign the 7:30PM deadline to turn in the movie so we hurridly packed up everything else while it dumped the movie to tape and then Dan and Dallas rushed off to take it in while David and I drove more leisurely.

We arrived and found great parking, paid our admission (reduced for participants) and at 8PM (showtime) we went in. Then we sat and sat and sat because they didn’t bother to check that they had things set up to play video correctly. It was also > 80 degrees F (26.7 degrees C for you metric types) and the chairs were uncomfortable and it turned out the sound was really bad in there. Also the camera they used to play the movies ran out of battery power half-way through all the films.

Anyway, there were some really good films and I like ours, but I’m not impartial about that. My favorite one was about a cat that was on a murderous rampage. It was a tiring day, but given the opportunity, I’d do it again.