The Making of Chasing People

Jonathan here again, with a behind the scenes look at the making of Chasing People!



We filmed this short video last Saturday.  My younger brother, Aaron, and I arrived at Grant’s house at 9:45 and started shooting a film there.  The videos we film are often hit or miss, so we actually filmed three videos this day.  Usually, only one video from such a day actually makes it onto YouTube.

Anyway, after filming at Grant’s house, we began the 45 minute drive back to my town where we all were attending an event with my family.  On the way, we stopped off the interstate in the town where we filmed The Obstacle and Robin Hood Lives.  We film in this town a great deal because it is between Gary and Grant’s house and mine.  It is a picturesque, small, New England town with a generally laid back populace.  I even have an Aunt, Uncle, and Cousins in this town.  This all makes it an ideal place to film.

We ended up in the parking lot of a busy shopping center.  Here, we tried to come up with an idea for a video.  Grant wanted to make an action video.  I suggested a movie where Grant was chasing people for fun.  We all liked this idea.  Always having been obsessed with long, interrupted camera shots, I suggested it would be really cool if we could film the video in one shot.  Aaron agreed to be chased and we were off!  After the first take, we realized that we would need some sort of script.  We threw ideas back and forth for about 20 minutes and came up with the script seen in the video.  Grant, being exceptionally good at memorizing lines, remembered the entire script without needing to write it down.  We began filming.  Grant accomplished it on the first take!  We were almost done!  We shot the ending in a couple takes and were ready.

We climbed back into my car and looked at the footage.  To our horror, the immaculate first take had no audio!  The culprit was the external microphone.  Actually, the culprit was me.  I forgot to turn it on.  It was puzzling because I heard audio through my headphones while filming the take, but, no matter what, we had to re shoot.  We tried a few times, but we just couldn’t seem to get through it again.  I decided that Grant needed a rest.  Because the lighting had changed, we got back in my car and made our way back to my town.

On the way, we got off the interstate again at a Church with a huge parking lot.  We filmed several takes here.  We only managed to get through the entire script twice.  I used the second of these two takes for the video.  We were not happy with it compared to the take without audio, but it was the best we had.  Of course, our opinion of the first take was probably inflated due to the joy we felt when we accomplished filming right off the bat.

For this video, we filmed with a Canon HV-20.  It’s small size made it easy to hold for the long handheld shot.  Unfortunately, the need of an XLR - 1/8 inch adapter for the microphone probably led to our audio woes.

Check back next week for another behind the scenes look at our videos!