Thursday, March 25, 2010

Secrets about our cast and crew


I sent out a questionnaire to the cast and crew of Day 2 before we began shooting. The questionnaire covered things like "What is your legal name?", for the contracts and "What is your shoe size?" for the costume designer, as well as asking about dietary needs and wants, etc so we would make production go along smoother. But the last question is:

"Giant robots have analyzed your DNA and discovered that you are not human. That is because you are:"

And I had some pre-fabricated answers which they could click on, or they could make up their own. A shocking number of them were made up. Here is the list of responses. Please match each response to the appropriate cast or crew member:
  • Mother sat on x-ray machine while pregnant
  • A Mark 3 combat android. Robots irritate you. You plan to wipe them out.
  • some sort of space fish. You don't want to know.
  • I Kick Ass
  • from L.A.
  • a cow
  • A Mark 3 combat android. Robots irritate you. You plan to wipe them out.
  • Really Zaphod Beebelbrox in disguise. I keep the third arm tied behind my back
  • .
  • unclassified plasma formatted to replicate human DNA

The people who answered are Tina Tanzer, David Ian Lee, Nat Cassidy, Tom Rowen, Danielle Quisenberry, Kathleen Kwan, Maduka Steady, Virginia Monte, Andrew Bellware, Brian Schiavo. But not in that order. Necessarily.

If you correctly match all cast/crew members to their own answer, the FBI will visit you personally, followed by an alien abduction. Unless you are, in fact, a Mark 3 combat android.

In which case please remember that I've always loved our robot overlords.

Did I say "overlords"? I meant protectors.

Plus also too we're working on this series of shots with Tina and Kathleen:

Untitled from Ralph Boswell on Vimeo.

10 comments:

Kangas said...

Looking good. Of course, a few more VC tutorials will have that looking perfect! :)

Andrew Bellware said...

Actually, all we're doing is taking out the shots that don't work. ;-)

Kangas said...

I figured it was still a work in progress. Which shots don't you think work? I only saw 1 that I don't think will work without major work. (some others I just thought need minor stuff like camera shake and whatnot)

I didn't comment 'cause I don't like to comment on unfinished stuff.

Andrew Bellware said...

Two things about it: one is that there are two different ideas about how the shot should work (big wides with falling fire from the sky, and the behind-the-characters shot) so we've simplified the sequence and just put one of the bluescreen shots in (the behind the character's shot).

It's the bluescreen which seems too flat to me.

Kangas said...

The shot behind them as the explosion grows is the one that I'm not buying. Maybe if it was like 18 frames of it and then cut out or something.

Andrew Bellware said...

I think you're right. And I think it's cause they're a bit to flat in the composite and because they react too late. So yeah, we cut into the shot about 18 frames and maybe the problem is solved.

Kangas said...

They react too late? Don't you add the effect in post, so you can make them react to your effect? Maybe do a digital zoom, a lot of camera shake(maybe even some subtle digital noise like the explosion's affecting the camera, but that might be much; have to see how it looks), and if it's 18-24 frames it'll look fine.

Andrew Bellware said...

"Didn't you add the effect in post?" Ha! No, man! We shot an actual alien invasion live! ;-)

Kangas said...

So you can see my confusion when you say "they react too late".

Don't you mean, our keyframe on that explosion occurs too early for their reaction?" :)

Andrew Bellware said...

Yes, that's actually what I mean (and the opposite of what I said ;-). It should be a fairly straight - up fix.