Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Woke Up Alone

I made my first short film/ music video, pairing a song a wrote on ukelele with a script I wrote. I was a bit worried about presenting it to my three classmates, because, although I knew one of them was into Eraseread (as am I), I didn't know how far I could push the envelope of weird and whimsical with the other two. It turns out they were all about it and aside from our actor having to cancel one day of shooting due to an emergency trip to Tijuana to bail his brothers out of a Mexican prison, the shoot went quite smoothly and the film turned out pretty much how we imagined it.





It started with the song and this papier mache' candy bowl kit by Martha Stewart, which I reappropriated into a mask.

Then when I really got the hang of making solid masks, I made these other two papier mache' beasties

This is the costume I donned for my performance as the band leader, obviously inspired by my love of day of the dead folk art




This is my favorite, partly inspired by the weird baby in David Lynch's Erasherhead, which I gave to Cameron, who played the drummer.


We also made a fake toaster with a working light that we timed out just right to look fakely realistic. Best of all, I got to use my Cassette Tape (a big inspiration in this project) from Etsy artist Analog Park ( Itraded a Spitting Image shirt for this awesome canvas tape):


We used lots of fake stop motion effects in which we made a filmed sequence appear to be stop-motion ever though it was shot in one take. For an example of this, watch the potted plant sequence. Its filmed in reverse, then sped up and frames are extracted from the sequence to appear choppy.


Theres an entire DVD worth of outtakes and bloopers which are probably only interesting to us so I'll spare you all. Without further ado, I present to you, "Woke Up Alone."




5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome Masks! Awesome Blog!

Anonymous said...

Oh and I like the homemade toast and jam (box)! Great video!

Leslie said...

oh oh oh!!!! I wanna do a feature on you! can i? :) Those masks are AWESOME!

Hey Harriet said...

Loved loved loved your film! I had already viewed it over at Amy's blog but forgot to pop over here to congratulate you! CONGRATS! Can't wait to see more!

Amber D. Mcnabb said...

saw your video on your sister's blog. You did a wonderful job! I love everything about it!