Special Features

I posted the video Cody and I made the other day, now it's time to hear about how it all came together.  When I first got Murray's chest I knew I would have to do a blog post about it because I have nothing else to write about.  My original plan was just have a picture of me opening the chest and I'd stick a lamp inside it, so with the lid open it would look like the inside was glowing.  Cody said we could that and then he'd put me in a shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I said okay, but it sounded pretty elaborate when I just wanted a picture.

I was at work and was thinking about the idea and I thought, "Why stop with one scene from Raiders?"  I was came up with a basic story (that doesn't make much sense) and a bunch of scenes we could use from the first three Indiana Jones movies.  When I went for my lunch break I took a piece of paper and started writing stuff before I forgot anything.  When I got home I gave to Cody to look over and he said he could it, it would be a lot of work, but he could do it. 

Cody and I both had the next Saturday off, so after lunch we started filming.  The process of filming only took just over an hour.  We filmed outside our townhouse, the sidewalk on the street in front of our place and a park a few blocks away which is all in the beginning of the film.  Everything else is all entirely green screen shots except for the end scene which is me in our kitchen.  With all the easy stuff done, I could sit back and relax and let Cody do all the hard work of editing, the green screen work, sourcing the Indy footage from DVDs, the effects and everything else I don't know how to do.

I took almost two weeks to get all the post production work, but I think it turned out better than I had expected.  During the green screen stuff I was just running around acting like an idiot, but I wasn't wearing my shoes.  In some scenes you could see I was barefoot, so Cody had to crop it so my feet weren't visible.  Also, had we sourced our Indy scenes in advance we probably could've known exactly what shots we needed to make them work, instead of Cody just doing his best with what we had.  We made a few mistakes, but we learned some stuff too, so next time it will be even better.  Maybe.

This is my four page "script" I scribbled out while at work.  We sometimes even did what was written on the page.   Props to Cody for going off script and adding two of the best things from the movie, the potato on the head and the map montage.  I thought up a bunch of other gags that we didn't use including the chilled monkey brains from Temple of Doom and an Arby's joke.  That one was for Cam.

Cody's fancy pants Canon camera.  I don't know how it works.  It is big.

Cody sets up for the first shot of the movie.  Using the LCD screen in the blinding sun is pretty difficult.

Yep, that is the green screen set up in our kitchen, we're so Hollywood.   It's just some green fabric Cody got from Micheal's taped to the wall.  In the scene where the chest on the ground next to the fertility idol from Raiders we had to lower the fabric so it covered the floor so the chest would sit on it.  We had to move everything in our kitchen over to the side out of the way to make room.

Cody is checking to see if the light from the blinds would mess with the green screen.  We can't have any shadows.

The camera set up down the hall.  Cody is actually reading the script?

I had gone out shopping earlier in the morning and forgot to get a potato.  We walked down to Co-op and I bought a baker's potato for 50 cents.

That's it.  Leave any questions in the comments and Cody or I will answer them.