Denny and I had been working on the new Humzoo Video section for so long that we were seeing code in our sleep. We needed a fun break and decided to have a little 'analog' fun by making a video. One week later, we were looking over the rough-cut of the finished product.

Click Here to view the finished movie

At a runtime of just over two minutes (minus credits), you might not think it took much time to put this movie together. Unlike most of my podcasts though, this one involved a lot of planning, several helpers and a complete storyboard.

The Script
One thing I almost always do wrong when I make podcasts is skip the script. I have no idea what's going to happen from scene to scene, and I just shoot footage and try to make it work later. In this case though, we did it right. We spent a number of hours going back and forth on how the story should be told. We refined, re-wrote and cut out unnecessary parts.

Storyboard
Once we had an idea of the story, I visualized it by drawing storyboards. These are basically quick illustrations that define the composition of each scene. While I didn't spend much time on the actual illustrations, I spent a lot of time thinking about how each scene flowed into the next.

One example is the opening dialog between Denny and myself. I thought it would look better to always have Denny on one half of the screen and me on the other half. Can't put my finger on why, but it seemed natural. Another example is the first sequence from inside Dane's. The direction I travel across screen is consistent from one cut to the next. I might start off going right to left, but then I change and go left to right. The next shot has me going from left to right too.


Click Here to download the whole storyboard


One of the most difficult shots to get was the side view of me on the pink bike on the sidewalk. The camera was mounted on a tripod in my minivan. Justin drove the van at a constant 10 miles per hour, and George gave me feedback about where I was in the frame, since I had no idea (and could only see the van out of the corner of my eye). We did several takes, and I think we ended up using the very first one.

Locations
Once we had our storyboard, it was time to figure out where to film this thing. I scouted places all over Springfield and ended up using locations from Washington Park, Centennial Park, Tara Hill and of course Dane's Discount.



Dane's was integral to the plot. Without Dane's, we had no movie. So I went into Dane's one day, storyboard in hand, and found Dane. He talked to me for a minute and had me run it by another guy he works with. They ended up letting us shoot in Dane's from 8am-9am, as long as we were out by 9:00 (since that's when the store opened).

I asked several people to show up to help in any way they could, mostly as extras pretending to shop. I didn't want the store to look totally empty. I had about seven people show up to help, which was the magic number. There's no way we could have done it with only six.

There were a couple shots inside Dane's where I wanted to have some neat camera movement. I worked the previous night rigging up a dolly, and the idea was to have someone on the dolly controlling the camera while someone else pulled the dolly slowly across the floor. In my mind it was going to look awesome, but it ended up being too shaky. We had to quickly ditch that idea and move on to handheld camerawork instead.

Foley
Foley is an interesting art that most movie viewers take for granted. It's the part of post-production where sounds that you would expect to hear during the movie are added back into the soundtrack (footsteps, passing cars, etc). These sounds never come across sounding like you'd expect when you shoot the movie, and ideally you want to block them out anyway to make sure you get good, clean dialog.

This was the first time I've gone back in and added sound, but I think the results are outstanding. There are almost no "actual" sounds used in this whole movie. The only sounds that came from the original records are our dialog and the computer game sound in the very first scene.

For the sounds of the pink bike, I took the camcorder outside and recorded several clips very close to the bike. I did things like ride through grass, skid across the driveway and set my bike down on pavement. All of those clips were sliced up, had their volume adjusted and were placed on the timeline of the movie to coincide with their visual counterparts on the video.

In Dane's, I pick up an item and say "awesome." The quality of the original recording was very poor, so I re-recorded me saying 'awesome' about 6 times later at home. So even though you see me saying 'awesome' at Dane's, it's really audio from me standing in my kitchen talking almost directly into the camcorder.

The End
I had an awesome time working on this movie, and I would love to make some more in the future. Big thanks to everyone who helped make this thing happen.

There is a 'making of' movie in production that will be uploaded to Humzoo on George's site as soon as Humzoo Video is available.