Tuesday, March 19, 2013

FUBAR

During my last trip back to Cranbrook, Willie and I worked on a secret project that I hinted at saying it needed some more work before it was ready to be unveiled.  I was getting things together to pass off to Cody for some fine tuning when I discovered a small problem, we royally fucked up.  Here's what happened...

Willie and I had shot some video on my phone with the plan to have Cody edit it with his fancy video editing software.  I downloaded this cheesy effects app off the Android Play store called FX Guru.  You shoot a short video scene and the app will overlay a grenade, bombing exploding, or UFOs overtop of the video to make it look like a fancy Hollywood movie.  Basically, we were just going to "blow up" stuff.  Me and Willie headed up to Gyro Park and shot as much footage as we could, but a few shots needed to have both of us in frame, so we headed down to Scarff HQ to look for some help, but no one was home.

Willie says hi.

In the meantime we headed around Cranbrook blowing up different spots around town like Mt. Baker, the Tamrack Mall, the Cranbrook sign into downtown and City Hall.  We went back to Scarff HQ and recruited Rod help to film the final few scenes back at Gyro Park.  The first take was a little shaky if you know what I mean, but he nailed it the second try.  All the Cranbrook footage was in the can.

Once back in Calgary I got various audio clips off the internet to be used in the film and even made a prop as I had a couple more scenes to shoot with Cody before it was entirely finished.  While I was loading everything onto a USB drive I was viewing the stuff I shot with Willie and noticed an epic fail of mammoth proportions.  We were missing most of the footage!

The prop I made, what awesome craftsmanship.

When Willie and I were screwing around filming our scenes at Gyro we messed up with the actual recording.  When we were pausing it, we were actually recording and when we were recording, we were actually pausing it.  So we don't have any of the footage we needed, just lots of shots of the ground while we walked around or handed the phone to each other.  I feel like a complete idiot and hang my head in shame.  It happened when I was filming Willie and he kept laughing and couldn't do his scene, so I paused it, un-paused, paused and then screwed up.  It's totally my bad.

It guess that is the problem with touch screens, you tap the screen and it doesn't work or you tap it once, but it registers twice.  Although, we should've screened the footage first to see if the shots turned out the way we wanted them to.  If we had, then we would've caught it.  Well, I learned a valuable lesson anyway.

I was fun filming it, so hopefully we'll get to try it again and hopefully it will work this time.  It will also help that my hands won't be numb either as it was freezing that afternoon.  It wasn't too cold, but it was windy which made it a lot worse.  What footage we had looked okay, but it was overcast too, so if we had some nice sunny weather it would look a lot better.

Here's a clip that would've been in the movie just to give you a taste.

See if you can spot Willie!

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