La Cinema Vita

Hello, blogees. A few paragraphs. Sorry about the lack of acro, but the flu has indeed taken me over. It arrived in the middle of the night Sunday, I lurched around like a zombie all day yesterday, finally realized I had lost, and so I stayed home today and curled up in the Comfy Chair with a heating pad. Luckily while I was lurching yesterday, I lurched to my eye appointment, where the doctor took one look at me and wrote me a prescription for a z-pack while he was giving me my next year's contact lens take.

I'll be better soon. I'm chalking it up to dancing to the Hackensaws all night, then riding home with the air conditioner pointed at my face.

I don't know why I feel the need to write about this, other than as an example of problem-solving. Maybe you can use it in the future; maybe when I get bungled up on my next project I can come back and read it.

It all has to do with the latest Comfy Chair Cinema movie. If you've gone to the Comfy Blog, you read a little about the making of the movie and how it didn't go as planned. But I didn't really give you the whole painful version.

See, it was truly amazing when the DeepFatFriar and I got that moving background footage, and I have to say that was all his idea. My only idea was to crouch in the back of my car and film out the back window, which I knew wouldn't work because I'd have glass reflection and lines from the rear defroster. DFF was sure we could affix the camera to the top of the car and keep it safe, and by damn, he was right. The footage was beautiful. It was also funny, because the original footage had the sound of the wind flipping over the microphone for 25 minutes.

Anyway, I was sure that would be the hardest part of my movie, and boy, was I wrong. That was, pardon the wind pun, a breeze. The hard part was everything that came next.

See, the first time I tried it, I was at home. I'd put the already speeded-up footage on DVD, got Sherman in his car, and put him on a table where he'd be level with the TV. Then, because the original film was going to have different Poderosa characters getting in and out of the car, I threaded invisible thread through Peabody, Chilly Willy, and Hokie Bird (who was to jump on the car while it was tooling around Virginia Tech). I affixed the thread to skewers so I could easily lift and set them into the car. I got the camera exactly where it needed to be.

My hope was to do it all in one take. Start up the DVD, know who to pick up when, lift, tug, pull out, jostle the car back and forth. It didn't take me long to realize that this all wasn't really a one-person job but still I had at it, messing up, starting over, cursing, rewinding the DVD, cursing, messing up, cursing.

The first problem was that Mr Peabody has, if you'll (and he'll) pardon me, quite the large ass. He just wouldn't fit into the car without being pushed in, and I couldn't do that without my hand appearing in the film. He was fired from the production and replaced by Hermey Elf who, after about four tries, finally made it into the car. Sadly, newest Poderosa boarder Chilly Willy suffered the same fate when he kept sliding off the back of the car. He was replaced by Good Luck Baby Lily. I filmed a bit, it was fair at best, and when I loaded the film into my computer, that's when I realized something. The "rolling" problem.

When you film a TV screen, you get a horrible "rolling" effect. I went online to research this and found the only way to overcome it is to film off an LCD screen. That's when the whole project moved to Mr M's Thursday night. He had the right TV, and he certainly had a needed two hands, and so I put things off a few days.

Once in B'burg, things didn't get much better. First of all, and I know I kept losing my patience and it wasn't his fault, Mr M is not as into all this as I am. He doesn't have the patience to try something time after time after time, watching it fail over and over. He also didn't realize that I talk to myself while making a movie, and so I'd be saying, "Just wait a minute! Wait a minute!" and he'd think I was yelling at him when in fact I was telling myself to wait a minute.

At Poderosa East, Hermey was quickly replaced by Good Luck Baby Lily as the passenger seat-holder when Hermey refused to go in the seat, but it didn't really matter, because when it was Hermey's time to then hop onto the back of the car for the rest of the trip home, he would not hop. He fell off, he knocked Lily over, and we just couldn't get him lofted down onto the back of that car.

Mr M had ideas that involved completely re-threading him, but it still didn't work, and finally he came up with the idea of hanging him on a wire coat hanger to set him on the car. Now, you and I both know that a coat hanger is not invisible, but at that point I realized that if you're going to cheese something up you may as well go at it full-bore, so I agreed.

It still didn't work.

So we just made another cheesy move, lifting Hermey onto the car with the hanger, then stopping the film, getting him fixed upon the car, then starting it back up. A rather gaping edit, too, it was, when I watched it back.

And so, as I said in the movie blog, I ended up with a movie over 7 minutes long once titles were added (I was hoping to keep it under 6), and it just wasn't much. And even then, I was convinced this would be my movie. That I would publish it, apologize, and promise to do better next time.

That original night of filming at Mr M's, I'd also brought Sherman's Vespa, just to see if I could record a minute or two of him in front of that same background footage and stick it on the blog just as a little extra. We didn't have time to do it because we spent over two hours filming the original car footage.

But Saturday I was back in B'burg for clarinet quartets with Mr M and his students, and I brought the Vespa with me again. And my camera. And Sherman. While we took a break and the others were looking through music, I excused myself and set about the task of recording Sherman.

Oddly enough, the only difficult thing about it all was moving enough lamps around for lighting - Mr M has some damned heavy lamps. Once they were in place, I affixed Sherman to his Vespa, turned on the DVD with the footage, and filmed. It took maybe 30 minutes. Maybe.

When I got back home I uploaded and looked at the Vespa footage and loved it. It was so simple - all I'd done was just jiggle the board the Vespa was taped to so it would look like he was dipping back and forth on the road.

It was also just 3 minutes long. And I realized that this would be the Comfy Chair movie.

My first thought was to use "Born to Be Wild," or some other rough and tumble motorcycle gang song, then it hit me. Vespa - Italian. I went looking for my "8 1/2" soundtrack, and recorded enough of the main theme to fit the film I had.

Then it hit me that since I was using music from "8 1/2" - remember, if you're going to cheese something up, go at it full-bore - I'd make it black and white. Then it hit me that if I was going to use the music from "8 1/2" and make it black and white, I'd try to do the titles in Italian. (A look at the credits for "8 1/2" and an English/Italian film site helped there.) I'd have Sherman in his own Fellini film! And I have to tell you, when I thought to put "Fine" at the end, I was pretty damn proud of myself.

And so that's how "Ciao!" came to be. It was about 1% of the movie I'd set out to make. I thought outside myself. And that's why I like making Comfy Chair movies. For those times I do what I'm sure I can't.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cough a little while.


Betland's Olympic Update:
* A thousand thanks to those of you who gave me ideas about how to de-ink Sherman. As soon as I feel like mingling with the great unwashed I'm heading out for some Oxy Clean. I'll certainly let you know the results!