Making: Chapter 01

This story came about from exploring the backstory of all the main characters from the main "5pm" story.  In the earliest iteration of "5pm", after the two drivers kill each other, a Scavenger walks out of the desert and drives away in the car with the most gas.  This story sought to expand on that Scavenger character by making him a Werewolf.  However, the first iteration was with Stephen Leavitt, who would later have to drop out of the project, which lead to the casting of Hope Trainor.

~First Iteration~
Stephen and I met up early near the Superstition Mountains in Apache Junction, Arizona.  There were lots of horse-riding trails, and power lines.  I set up a GoPro timelapse to capture the sunrise, and we recorded most of the short while the timelapse was going.

Stephen and I talked about what the story would be, bouncing lots of different ideas around.  What was sure was that the Werewolf would be recording a series of confessions of his activities over the past two years, after he traded his soul for the ability to shapeshift.  In this iteration, he would turn into a wolf when he fell asleep.  The first half was the character explaining his situation to the camera, and the second half was him rambling about the different people he had killed.  While recording, the lavalier microphone picked up lots of electrical noise from the power lines.

~Second Iteration~
Hope and I filmed the fight scene for Ch.5 in a recreational area in Gold Canyon.  There was a small grove of Joshua Trees, which was very photogenic.  We expanded the story to make the character a traveler who collects abilities and studies the supernatural.  She recorded herself and I recorded her from another angle.

After everything was recorded, I went to edit it all and discovered that her microphone had dislodged itself, so all the audio was useless.  I put together an edit with the camera audio(which was also unusable due to a constantly clicking autofocus), and then reached out to Hope to re-record the dialogue.  She was out of the country at the time, so she recorded her lines on her cellphone then sent me the files.

Finally, my father reached out to some people he knew to gather photographs of the werewolf's victims. They sent me pictures of themselves sprawled out, and I added gore and wounds as well as removing text and images from their clothes.  Then I rendered out the slideshow in Blender 3D, as well as the images of papers and documents.

Were I to do it over, the biggest change I would have liked to do would be to capture it during sunrise again, and certainly to correctly record the audio the first time.  The color and direction of light changing over the course of the shots adds a very nice quality, I think.  As well, nailing the specific details of the story would have let me confidently print some documents for actual photographs instead of 3D renders.  However, the flexibility of the rendering did allow me change the details, formatting, lighting, and composition of those insert shots.