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myMovie 3: Day of the Lagomorph: A Tale of Domestic Terror

Let me just start off by saying, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I want to make movies, but never have. Now that I have access to a digital video camera (a Canon GL-2, on loan) and editing software (iMovie HD 5), as well as the strong suspicion that there are others out there like me, I've decided to just dive in head first.

The first thing I wanted to do was to stop thinking about it and, for better or for worse, actually shoot and edit a finished product. The idea of having to have a professional product on my first try was paralyzing me. I decided instead to give myself permission to fail, and treat the whole thing as a learning experience.

Since I wanted to work quickly and do the whole film in one go without giving myself a chance to put it aside, promising that I'd "get back to it later," I decided to make the film extremely short. Like, two minutes. The story needed a beginning, middle and end, so I decided to film a joke, or funny story.

I decided to use something that had actually happened a few years ago. I was in the bathroom. When I touched the faucet to turn on the water, I got a nasty shock. I (eventually) figured out that I was standing barefoot on a power cord that had been chewed through. When I touched the faucet, I completed the circuit. I looked out the bathroom and saw that my pet rabbit Hazel was watching me.

Rabbit assassination attempt. Perfect. I had everything I would need to film it: My apartment, a camera, a tripod, and my cast (Hazel and me).

To figure out what the movie would look like before I started filming (and so I wouldn't waste time), I sketched out some rough storyboards, which are just simple pictures describing what the audience will see on screen. You don't have to know how to draw (as you can see, I used stick figures), and they really helped me clarify what I wanted to have the picture look like.

Since there was no dialogue and the film was so short, I didn't write a script. Besides, Hazel would have simply eaten it.

Having storyboarded it, the film broke down like this:

1. The alarm clock goes off.
2. I wake up.
3. I stumble to the bathroom and
4. turn on the stereo.
5. I touch the faucet and
6. get a shock.
7. Touch it again (I really did that).
8. Get another shock.
9. Look down.
10. Notice I'm standing on a power cord.
11. Inspect it.
12. See that it's been chewed.
13. Look out of the bathroom.
14. See Hazel, who hops away.

Looking over the shots, there didn't seem to be anything that I couldn't shoot with the tripod or myself.

Shooting:

I shot on a Saturday morning when there was lots of natural light spilling into my bedroom (I have no artificial lights other than the ones in the room). I set the alarm clock to go off (giving myself enough time to turn on the camera), and waited. As the radio kicked it, I got a lucky break: the person on the radio was talking about a weekend program where you could learn to give CPR to your dog, which I thought would make a funny contrast to the idea of my pet trying to kill me.

LESSON: Always shoot more at the beginning and the end of the shot than you need. This wasn't really a lesson I learned during the shot; I knew this from some of the books I'd been reading. As you probably know, when you stop a camera from recording, it backs up a few seconds on the tape, so you don't want to erase the end of a good shot with the beginning of the next one. Also, you can edit out stuff you don't need with iMovie, but you can't create it. So, shoot a little extra.

Next I set up the tripod to record me waking up. I wanted an extreme close-up of my eye, snapping awake, to give it kind of a horror movie feel.

The Canon GL-2 has an LCD screen that flips over so that the subject can see himself. I set the camera up right next to my face on the bed, and ran into the first problem: auto-focus.

Auto-focus can be a valuable feature for the home video maker, but the bane of fictional film. The camera will try to stay focused by adjusting itself, however, what the camera thinks is important and what the filmmaker thinks is important are two very different things. Having the camera focus shift in the middle of a shot is very distracting. So, I turned off the auto-focus.

LESSON: If you turn the camera off, then back on, it will revert to its default settings. In my case, it turned the auto-focus back on , and wrecked a later shot. Lesson learned: always check your settings.

The extreme close up on the eye was problematic because I wear glasses and am very nearsighted. If I tried to focus the shot while wearing my glasses, I couldn't see my eye very well, due to glare. If I took my glasses off, I had a hard time seeing if I was in focus. I adjusted it as best I could, and took the shot.

The next shot was me, in bed, turning off the alarm clock. I sat the camera on the tripod so that it would be looking down on me, hit record, and turned off the alarm clock. While I was doing that, I thought it would be funny if I fell out of bed. So, I fell out of bed.

What wasn't funny was that my foot hit an end table (offscreen). I heard a nasty crashing noise, and saw my Lava Lamp laying on its side. Fortunately, the only thing that broke was the 40 watt bulb inside the lamp, but still, it was careless of me. I cleaned up the glass.

Since I'd added something new (me falling out of bed), I felt I had to add a new transition. I wanted to show me getting up off the floor, as if nothing had happened. Well, breaking a 40 watt bulb must be seven minutes of bad luck, because I started running into problems at this point.

First, simply posing the shot was difficult. I couldn't shoot it from the place where I had actually fallen, because that put the camera directly in line with the window that had sunshine streaming through it, casting me into shadows. I finally settled on a "blank" section of wall.

Then, the biggest tragedy of the day hit: one of the locks on the tripod's legs broke, and the camera lurched over as the leg couldn't support the weight anymore. Thankfully, the camera wasn't damaged (it fell on the bed), but I had to keep an eye on it for the rest of the shoot. I did the shot, then decided it would be funnier if I had the blankets wrapped around me, and shot it again that way.

Next, a shot of me walking down the hall into the bathroom. It seemed to go fine (though I would find a big problem with it in editing).

The next shot was of me entering the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and reaching to turn on the radio. Up to this point, I had been shooting in order: one shot following another one just as they were in the script. However, the script had several shots of me in this position: my reaction to getting shocked (both times), and looking down at my feet. So, having gotten the camera set up, I shot all of these scenes one after another but remembering to leave about ten seconds between shots! I set the camera on the tripod for this, and ran into problems when the leg started to collapse again. Gah.

The next shots were close ups of my hand turning on the radio (actually, pressing "play") and touching the sink. These were slightly awkward, as I was filming with one hand while shooting with the camera in the other (especially when I was holding the camera with my right hand). When I was shooting, I took longer than I normally would have, figuring that if I did them as quickly as I normally do, they wouldn't be on screen long enough to "register" with the audience. Wrong again.

For the shot of my foot standing on the cord, I decided to do a slow zoom-in, which would hopefully draw attention to the cord as something important. I then took another cord (a power adapter for a long-lost item), cut it to expose the wires, and did a close-up of it on the tile floor.

For the final two shots, me on the bathroom floor and Hazel watching me, I simply sat the camera on the floor. It was a bit difficult to work with Hazel. I had to set her on the ground and move my hands away, hoping that I could do it quickly enough to get a clean shot of her, before she hopped away. This took a couple of tries.

The whole shoot took about 25 minutes. However, a couple of re-shoots would be required.

Before I move on to editing and re-shoots, I want to talk for a minute about camera angles. The storyboarding helped immensely with figuring out where to put the camera, but also with what I wanted the film to look like. I purposely chose a variety of camera angles (extreme close ups, floor shots) to give the film a more dynamic feel, and also to give it a "horror film" feel, even though it's not the least bit scary. It also helped me get a clear idea of exactly the shots I wanted, so that I didn't waste any time or tape shooting things I would eventually not use.

Editing:

I gave my co-star a carrot and got to work on editing. I had enough space on my Powerbook to import everything I shot (my rule of thumb is that 1 hour of DV = 13 GigaBytes of hard disk space), but instead of doing that, I specifically hunted around for just the bits that I wanted.

The first problem I noticed was rather large: there was no sound. I didn't use the camera's integrated mic because I had an external one attached to it that I thought would give me better sound. Small problem: I forgot to turn the microphone on.

LESSON: Make sure the microphone is turned on.

So! I didn't have the bit with the radio announcer I was hoping to use. Fortunately, the film is basically silent anyway, so I was able to add in the few sounds I needed later.

Second big problem: In the scene where I walked down the hall into the bathroom, I forgot to take my glasses off. I'd been pretty good about it for the rest of the film, but that one take (which was, of course, the only take of that scene I shot), they were clearly there. This creates a continuity problem (unless they're, you know, "magical glasses"), so I'd have to re-shoot that scene.

Also, in the scenes with Hazel, I had a black rabbit in front of a dark green couch: she was practically invisible! And since that's the punch line, I knew I had to re-shoot that as well. With a lighter cloth draped over the couch. Some good came out of it, on the second re-shoot, Hazel sat still for several seconds, giving me a longer "take" than before.

Having gotten the shots, I went back to editing. When I shot the close up of the frayed cord, I had the camera in my hand. The shot was shaky, so I found a clean image of the cord, and converted it to a still frame. The only other trick I had to do was to edit the pieces where my hand touched the faucet so that I could use iMovie's flash effect exactly as I wanted it.

Editing the piece together, one thing became clear: some of the shots are simply too long. Pretty much anything related to my hands: turning off the alarm, turning on the radio, touching the faucet. Anything I thought needed more time to "register" with an audience, didn't. But, since I was assembling the film piece by piece, only checking to see how one shot transitioned with another, I didn't notice this until I had finished the editing. I should have gone back and re-shot those, but decided not to, since this film was a learning experience.

Another problem was that, as I feared, the extreme close up on my eye was out of focus. Not wanting to set the camera up on that tripod again, and figuring that it wouldn't be as noticeable when the video was reduced for the web, I let that one go, too.

Sound:

Since I was a big dork and didn't get any sound for the film, it was time to dub some in. I went over to Find Sounds and got an alarm clock going off and an electric shock. For the music from the stereo, I chose "Popcorn Man" by the Tunetwisters, a jaunty little tune that I picked up on the 365 Days Project.

Adding the alarm clock noise, I decided to try and compensate for the long time I spend fumbling with it by making the noise go up part way through (as if I had accidentally made it louder). I think it works as intended, however, making an annoying noise even louder may not have been the best idea.

The electric noise, combined with the flash effect and my reaction, worked perfectly. As for the music, I would have liked to have some kind of "disruption" sound right after the shock (to show that the radio was involved), but couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted, and it didn't make the joke unclear.

Credits were easy enough. I added the song to the ending again, just to tie it all up together, and also so it wouldn't end in silence.

Overall:

Looking at the finished product, I think it came together well. Some of the scenes linger a bit too long, but the whole thing is only two minutes long, so it's not like they're interminable.

What I'd Do Differently:

Tighten up the inserts, certainly, and uh, what was that other thing? Oh yeah, make sure the microphone is turned on! But, all in all, for shooting it myself with a total shoot and edit time of about an hour and a half, it's great.

And I can finally say I've made a movie.
 

Day of the Lagomorph: A Tale of Domestic Terror (3.4MB .mov)

Edition 4: Unlocked, Unchained

Edition 2: Cast Crew, Sets and Props

Bill's been using Macs since the late 80s. When he's not making smartass remarks to amuse Kirk Hiner, he enjoys fighting for the user.