project 6 evaluation

04.28.08

an interesting project, to say the least... essentially, the possibilities are endless, although not being able to use a videocamera was both a blessing and a curse. the project would have been easier, sure... but much less novel.

as soon as i heard in class that we couldn't use a video camera, my immediate reaction was "webcam" and to somehow simulate a skype conversation between two people using the iSight camera on my iMac. luckily, i had a stationary iMac and a movable macbook at my disposal, so i didn't have to do too much worrying about what the mystery prop was going to be and how i was going to work it in. before we got the mystery prop, i had become fairly set on using the skype conversation as my story line, the iSight as my mode of recording, and a digital camera as a third viewpoint if need be. i was also set on using my two weirdest (and most lovable) friends as the actors. what i wanted to do, essentially, was to make the strangest movie possible. looking back, i think it worked.

on the saturday before class, i asked my two friends to spare me four or so hours on tuesday to be in my movie, and they gladly obliged. so on monday the mystery prop was assigned, and it made it none-the-less easy to decide what type of story i was really going to do (i've never been a real 'narrative' kind of person) but luckily, on tuesday, my friends showed up at my house with costumes, props, and rough outline of what they wanted to say...

the story had alot to do with my friend meredith, and her infatuation with DMX, and her recent hunt downtown to find him upon hearing that he was in town shooting a movie. (which worked by the way. she met him last week, got a picture with him [which unfortunately did not turn out, because it was supposed to be the last shot of my movie, full circle], but for a girl who is never at a loss for words, she really had no idea what to say...) so we kind of took that premise and developed it into what was to become "godbot," or, that egg-shaped green piece of chalk that provides the user with the gift of pure communication.

i set them up in rooms next to each other (my other roommate recently got the boot, so one room was totally empty), and we started decorating. we decided that justin should probably be surrounded by plants and candles, seeing as how he was fairly magical. meredith was set in my room, filled with rocks and minerals and other such magical things. come time to script, we were having a bit of a problem. justin, who is normally the weirdest of the weird, couldn't seem to let it flow... stage fright (camera fright) was taking over... but we developed somewhat of a "script" and just kind of ran with it. we did about 12 take total... some with them actually on skype with each other, while i was filming with the digital camera for B roll, and most of the rest with the iSight filming them as they had conversations in the same room. the last shot only took one take. meredith is on point.

so after about four hours of shooting i set them free, and it was time to edit. only about 40% of the footage that was shot was usable, mainly due to acting performace, talking over each other (unusable dialogue), their dog howling in the background from outside, etc...

but i was able to chop it up, and find fairly usable parts from each section of the "script" that made it a "complete" narrative. since i had so little to work with, that wasn't too hard of a project... i just had to get them all in the right order, do some overlapping of dialogue/action, and i almost had a movie. before taking it into the lab, i decided to add a DMX song underneath it all to play throughout the whole thing (which is where the R rating came from). once i got into the lab to print to video, i realized that the movie was totally flat, so i ended up deleting the DMX track (or at least moving it to the very end) and adding a score, i.e. songs to coincide with each of the characters, justins being a whimsical forest tune, merediths a magical queen song, and a bit of chinese bells in between. that made a world of difference, and the DMX song was brought in at the very end to tie it all together.

and so that was my project... fun, interesting, and very very weird...