Greetings, men, women, elves, ents, orcs, hobbits, wizards, bounty hunters, droids, Jedi, and imperial scum. It’s Jonathan again with a behind the scenes look at Momma’s Boys.
Oh where to begin? The process we went through to create this video is Paperclip Films at its best… or worst… I don’t know really.
This past Saturday, Grant starred in a home school production of Harvey. Harvey is a story about a man who is friends with a six foot tall, invisible rabbit. Grant played this man. The whole cast did a great job and it was very enjoyable. While I was watching the play, I came up with an idea for a video in which my character would be at a party refusing to socialize. This would be because he smelled bad, due to a lack of deodorant. In the midst of his woe, an imaginary friend would comfort him and try to convince him to have fun despite his smell. Grant loved this idea. Grant had invited me to the cast party afterward, so we decided to film there.
When we arrived at the cast party, we socialized for a time and then went outside to start filming. At this point, I had fallen from my earlier caffeine/attention induced comedic rampage and was having a hard time being funny. Grant, my brother Aaron, and I tried to finish (or begin, for that matter) the imaginary friend video, but it was all in vain. Having accosted two other members of the cast, Connor and Zach, to be in the video, we decided to come up with a different idea. After all, we had to get a video done before Tuesday no matter what! We went inside to warm our brains and think some more.
Inside, Gary and his friend Jen, from college, who had made the 5 hour drive to see Grant’s performance, were warming themselves by the fire and conversing with the multitudes. We begged them to help with a video and they agreed, as long as we stayed indoors. We conceded. Now myself, Grant, Aaron, Connor, Zach, Gary, and Jen began searching for a location to film. Earlier, I had seen a secluded room in the basement. After no other location seemed suitable, I suggested we film there. Finally, aided by the wits of Jen, Connor, and Zach, we planted ourselves in this room and began to brainstorm.
And brainstorm we did. At first, we decided we wanted to film an apocalyptic video in which Gary was in possession of the world’s last Triscuit. Next, we thought it should be an apocalyptic video about how Jen was the last woman on earth and all of us men were trying to impress her. After this idea was shot down, we realized we had too many characters and cut down the cast to Grant, Connor, and Zach. After looking at the three of them, the idea of making a video about “a couple of posh bros chillin'” was tossed around. Luckily for humanity, this idea was scrapped. Humanity was not out of the water yet; however, as we then tried to film an interview with a boys band named “the cart boys.” Grant liked the idea of it being an interview with lowly cart boys from a local supermarket, but again humanity was saved when we decided to stop wasting tape on both ideas
At this point, I was getting worried. It was past midnight, I was an hour from home, and freezing rain was a expected. Luckily for me, Gary had the idea to turn off the lights and have the boys lit by nothing more than a lantern that happened to be lying around. We decided that the boys would be conducting some sort of group therapy session. At first, we thought their problem would be marital issues, but we quickly such a problem would not affect teenage boys. The obvious choice after this was problems with mother. After about 30 minutes and one broken mug later (that crash sound at the end was not added in editing), we developed and filmed the video that is now resting peacefully on our YouTube channel. My brother and I did not get home until 2am, but at least we had our video finished.
But wait! Just when we thought everything was settled, there was a problem. I had not turned the audio limiter on when I was filming; thus, Grant’s yelling went beyond the acceptable threshold, causing the ghastly clicking and popping sounds that are associated with this mistake. It was abysmal… and unacceptable to say the least. Monday night I made the impromptu decision to meet Grant at The Obstacle and record his voice again. Grant’s mom was nice enough to drive him and we recorded his voice-overs in my station wagon. Grant replayed the video on my ipod touch and shouted his lines after listening to them a few times, as I recorded him with the camera. He did a great job, and I was easily able to match it up on the computer.
We filmed this video with the Canon HV-20.
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