Where to start? A bit obvious, perhaps. When we were initially brainstorms ideas around the brainstorm table, we were thinking of fun, interesting scenes that we could do and came up with several movies and TV shows that we had loved as an audience ourselves. Thinking of the ways we could twist and change them in such a way that would be recognizable to the audience (whether they were fans of those particular films or not) but also acting as a way of advertising that we not only make cool commercials, but also love doing it. You wouldn’t feel good about paying someone who hates taking photographs to take your portrait, would you?
We settled on scenes from Fight Club, Lost in Translation, Whiplash, Taken and Breaking Bad. Which scenes? You’ll have to watch the parodies to find out. We chose these because they were something that we remember as one of the viewers at the time, thinking things like “I love it!”, “That’s so f*cking cool!” or “I can’t believe that just happened” – and several other phrases and mixes of expletives as those above. They left us shell-shocked, motivated, impressed, gob smacked and… entertained. Playing homage to something that’s affected you in such a way is one of the biggest ways you can show respect, as long as you do it in the right way. That was the tricky part.
Vee is the very model of a modern major BATMAN!
There were technical hurdles, social hurdles, transport hurdles – actually, we should start a hurdle business now I’m thinking about it – and we’ll go into specifics in the incoming barrage of production-based behind the scenes blog bonanza (yup, I tried saying that out loud too). For now, I’ll talk about how we got ideas for the scripts.
We started by watching those scenes, popping the links into YouTube repeater and driving ourselves insane with the cinematography, acting, sound design and editing style, trying to break down and understand the choices that the editors and director had made in regards to the way that they portrayed things in the way they did. Thankfully, we had an amazing cinematographer on board, Nicholson Ren, along with the equally amazing chief lighting technician, Ian Vandermey. They helped myself and Vee Shi (shout out to the baddest ass of directory bad-assness) to think of the way we could capture the scenes in a way that was akin to the original – all we had to do was to come up with the shot lists and references images.
Ahhh, the shot list - the bane of ACs around the world, but a crucial part of the production process.
These acted as the basis for our discussion about the ever-elusive topic… light. After all, cinematography is made of two equally important halves. Lights and lenses. The shot list, idea of the general location, time of day and whether it was indoors or outside determined how the scene was to be lit, as well as potentially affect how much space we had to play with and, therefore, help us narrow down the focal length to use, using the reference as a guideline. We’ll talk more about this in the next post, but the location scouting and trying to figure out what space we were shooting in brought about many (you guessed it) hurdles for us to jump over.
Needless to say, after the scripts were written and we had ideas in our minds for the shots we needed, we turned our attention to the talent. You can light something well. You can shoot it beautifully. But if the people in front of the camera are flat, unreactive or, in worst case scenarios, can’t act at all… you’ve got your work cut out for you. That’s where the beauty of the internet came in handy. Star Now, lord and savior of film producers around the world, was a god send in aiding us to find actors that not only had the drama chops, but also to find people that would suit the characters that they would portray (something that can be more difficult to do than it sounds).
After posting the ads, we had an overwhelming and at the same time humbling amount of responses to the sketches we were advertising. For one, we had over twenty applicants wanting to audition for the piece. Sometimes it was difficult going through showreels, as everyone just seemed great for the part. Other times it was like a flashing bulb of lightning clarity that this was the person we wanted to play the role – like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh.
Anton Chigurh - One of THE most thrilling villains we’ve seen on screen - and a FAVE of ours.
We narrowed down the hit list of actors like Anton walking through the hotel hallway, picking them off, one by one until we were happy with our choices, requesting further examples in circumstances where we weren’t sure or just to further test that actor’s abilities.
I could literally talk on and on – and I will, just in further posts. We’ll be talking about each scene and breaking down the difficulties and obstacles we had to overcome in each, covering location scouting, technical problems and how we had to adapt, as well as the creative choices we made to represent certain things in the narrative (adding that lovely layer of subtext). I hope you’ll stick around for more and look forward to sharing all of this with you in the incoming posts.