Lord of Recycling

Lord of Recycling
This video took around 2 months from concept to completion. My friends told me about the RCBC’s trailer trashed film festival, and seeing as I seem to only make trailers nowadays, I figured I had to enter. The hardest part of this project was costumes, locations and spfx in that order. Luckily, Richard Olak had a few costumes left over from his feature film “The Battle of Burgledorf” which he kindly leant us (and wore, for his take on Aragorn). Everything else was scrapped together from trash bags, egg-cartons and discount fabric/leather. For our locations, we looked around everywhere for the perfect spots, and while BC has a ton of Beautiful scenery, a lot of it isn’t very accessible to film gear. Finding the spots was very stressful, but shooting practically always looks better than CGI (which we had a lot of in this film). I would say the biggest mistake of the film was to include Gollum, who took up nearly 30-40 hours of work for the 12 seconds he’s on camera. At least now I can say I’m a poor-man’s WETA!

Leave A Comment, Written on October 5th, 2011 , Megasteakman
Darth Vader NO Deleted Scenes

Darth Vader NO Deleted Scenes
This was supposed to be an easy one, but I thought it was funnier if we saw Vader throw everything down the shaft in the same shot. Most FX were rather easy, but a few took hours of work (the domino shot was quite a mess: I had to roto Darth’s body, cover the floor with a still frame of carpeting to cover the pieces that bounced off the green screen, and roto individual pieces/animate Jenga pieces falling down the shaft (because by the second wave the greenscreen was covered in blocks). Still, it was worth it. Stephen did a great job of playing Vader and doing the ADR ‘nooo’s. pretty much every ADR takes was perfect the first time. Sound was definitely the most important thing in this video, and the foley work that Adrian did really set the video apart from the rest of our stuff.

Leave A Comment, Written on October 5th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
The Idea Men: World’s Longest 2 Minute Video

The Idea Men: World’s Longest 2 Minute Video
I feel like the biggest problem with this video is that it only becomes really funny once you know that they are working for NBC’s ‘The Office.’ I wanted to title it in a way that prepped the viewer so they were in on this joke from the beginning, but instead we opted for the end title to be the joke that pulls the whole piece together. My favourite part about this film (besides the lighting on Conor and Alicia’s shot) is the direction for Tyler and JJ to have some kind of complicated hand blocking that accompanied their dialogue. We used the “Scott Pilgrim” technique of repeating couplets of lines faster and faster until the words were almost incomprehensible.

Leave A Comment, Written on October 5th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , ,
Boobs, Boobs, Economy, Boobs

Boobs, Boobs, Economy, Boobs
I’ll admit: many of our ideas are what are often called ‘Bottle’ episodes, which require much less time, actors, locations, resources to make than say a Scott Pilgrim Vs 60 Seconds or Pokémon Apokélypse. That said, a director often has much more control when there are less variables to worry about, and can focus on doing a lot with a little. The location of GameDeals in New Westminister was absolutely amazing, and provided a lot of cool details to each shot. It was really fun to light in there: especially with the mirror wall. My one regret is that I had to choose between two funny moments that occured over the same line of dialogue (so I couldn’t show both without repreating the line). Basically, in one take when Jen mentions cameras everywhere and Tyler responds, she winks at the camera over Tyler’s shoulder. Instead I opted to cover Tarek’s dancing in the background, which was pretty classy.

Leave A Comment, Written on October 5th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , ,
That Guy Knows How to Party

That Guy Knows How to Party
Around the time I got this idea, my good friend Chris Apps was just about to move to Alberta, and I remember him telling me that ‘being in a Megasteakman video’ was on his Vancouver bucket list. It seemed like a perfect fit, so during his going away party I arranged to shoot what might be our strangest video yet. I’m not sure if it translates, but the core concept to me was that the protagonist was “absolutely tripping balls,” which was revealed at the very end. I don’t really know anything about drugs, but in retrospect I should have had him doing something more H-core than drinking (it’s ok, because it’s an anti-drug video… right?) The hardest part of this video was simulating the man on fire (Adam Suliman). I basically created a torso in 3D, and animated it’s arms and rotation to match what Adam was doing and then ran a fluid simulation using Turbulance FD. For all the work that went in, however, I much preferred the Nyan Cat gun, which might make another appearance in a later vid.

Leave A Comment, Written on October 5th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , , ,
28 Geeks Later – Zombie Short Film

28 Geeks Later
28 Geeks Later was treated more like an actual short film than our typical videos, which all start with a script, but are largely improvised in terms of coverage (what angles we shoot).  Tyler Nicol and I went to the location a few days before the shoot to work out the blocking for the scene.  It was important to me to keep the actors moving, and to choose placements that either reflected or added to what was going on in the script (for example, placing the two actors on opposite pillars really created an interesting dynamic where they had to argue while still remaining invisible to the human survivor at the end of the hall).  After the blocking was sorted out, we ran around with the camera and created a ‘test film,’ which showed key movements and angles I wanted to cover.  This test film was translated into a floor plan, which we followed through to the bitter end (shooting went from 6:00pm until 3:00am).  Everyone performed admirably, and I must say that even though I am not a huge fan of zombie movies, I am very proud of this film.

Leave A Comment, Written on August 10th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , , ,
Megasteak of the Union 7-12-2011

Megasteak of the Union
I actually had this one written for a few weeks, (in my back pocket, as it were), waiting for the perfect time to strike.  My youtube partnership was just recently granted, and I was quarantined home from work all week, so it made sense to release the video as it was a one man show.  The rendering and compositing took way longer than I thought; I finished the video at 3 in the morning, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing (outside of making the 3D sets look a little better).  I wanted to come up with a creative way to let people know of all the great creative things our team has been doing under the megasteak-banner, and I’m glad that even though the video was really just a shameless informational/announcement video, it got some great laughs (the best being when Tarek explodes in the woods: that was all his idea).

1 Comment, Written on August 10th, 2011 , Megasteakman, Videos Tags: , , , ,
My Top 8

My Top 8
This project was written and directed by my good friend Nathan Kelly. In order to get the fast paced readings, we tried out a technique pioneered on the Scott Pilgrim Vs 60 Seconds set. Essentially, we kept running portions of the scene in a loop, seeing how quickly the scene could be performed. Come to think of it, I don’t think we used a single take that used this method, but it was great fun regardless. The piece was designed to be fast and furious, so we needed to find nice moments to slow things down (my favourite being Nate’s improvisation of singing ‘LOVE.’) You can’t speed run everything!

1 Comment, Written on July 18th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , , ,
Paw and Order

Paw and Order: Official Trailer
I love cat videos: nothing quite beats the joy of seeing a cat doing something inexplicable on camera. The only downside to these internet marvels is their common low recording quality. Now, I can understand having a poor quality recording if your video is an elusive shot of big foot, but these are cats. I shot probably 30 minutes of 23.98 FPS, but was frustrated at how little usable footage there was. The kittens were quite erratic, so I shot at 60 FPS to get the slow-mo look. Originally, I was going to use “Oh Fortuna” played on a ‘meow’ synthesizer, but I fell in love with song we found, and used it’s tone to inform the whole project.

Leave A Comment, Written on July 6th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , ,
MSM Pregnancy Test

MSM Pregnancy Test
I love fake commercials. The form is really well suited towards social commentary. Advertising, in a way, just might be our dominant cultural myth in North America. The MSM pregnancy test was written to be a ‘bottle episode’: limited cast and locations, yet somehow it ended up being our longest shooting schedule to date, taking place over two weeks. Nicholas Porteous had the idea of tacking on one of the most ridiculous disclaimers I have ever heard, but even more outrageous was Tarek Suliman’s suggestion for a joke, in which a couple receives a swastika, look at each other and shrug. If I had another couple to shoot, I would have totally gone for it.

Leave A Comment, Written on June 30th, 2011 , Videos Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Megasteakman

Heroic sketch comedy