Making: Chapter 05

The first thing filmed for Chapter 5 was actually Carter’s part.  He wanted to wrap his part, so after swapping his character’s role we met up and shot his part.  We got a lot of extra coverage, because i wasn’t sure how eveything would fit together and i wanted to keep my options open.  He wanted to wrap his part, so we swapped his role as a driver to that of the scavenger.  We filmed a lot of coverage to keep my options open in the edit.  SOme scenes were shot in the sun, then in the shade, then from the left, then from the right, etc.  In one take I forgot to put the keys in the ignition, but then with later story developments there ended up not being keys, so we used the alternate take.

My dad and I went to a trailhead to record all the parts that we figured wouldn’t need actors.  When I would be able to coordinate more people, I wanted to already have as much as I could in the editing project file.  Dad and I recorded the whole car sequence, dad recorded and I drove.  I used visual effects editing to speed things up and reverse the direction of the sedan.

After we had all the car chase footage, I put together a very crude animatic that I could show to potential castings.  It was basic shapes and edited pictures animated in Blender, very rough but it let me plan out the shots I would need.  I even added temp music.

Hope Trainor was very busy, so we filmed her part without knowing who would play Cooper’s part.  My dad had work that day, so the first thing we did was record the fight scene.  My dad worked the camera, and Hope and I figured out the fight scene on set.  I had planned some basic choreography, but on set we figured out something that felt more natural.  What remained from my ideas was stabbing her in the wrist, and using the weighted hat as a weapon.  For story reasons, I would be killed by the Black Spot.

In the earliest iterations of the script, the business card was a homage to the cards in American Psycho, but after I came up with the name for “Cooper’s custom coffins & caskets”, I figured I could make a card design more appropriate.  Originally, the framing device starred a woman who worked for C.c.c&c, but when the story changed I still liked the name.

During the fight scene, I got cracked in the head when I ran into the car door.  The blood you can see is chocolate syrup again, but I was actually bleeding under it.  It also knocked off my glasses, so a lot of the scene was organically figuring out what options were available for the characters.

After my dad left, we recorded the new version of Chapter 1.  We were recording in a patch of desert, and there was a small “grove” of joshua trees, most standing but some had fallen and dried up.  My plan was to film it the same as the first one:  Hope would record herself, I would record her, and we would cut between them in editing.  In practice, we only ended up using her videos, but I did use the third-person videos in the eventual wrap-around sequence.

Hope wanted to outline the story for herself, so while we were talking she wrote out the monologue.  She also came up with the name for her character.  She asked and I told her what other characters were called: Sandman, Hunter, and Cooper.  She noticed the -er pattern, so she named her character Harper.  I would keep up the motif when I named the character in Chapter 2 “Wilbur”.

After recording Chapter 1, we were ahead of schedule so we got an early lunch, went home and got ready to record the rest of Chapter 5.  First we would record her stealing the car, then drive out to a row of abandoned mailboxes I had once seen to record her getting rid of the camera.

Since I didn’t know who would be playing Cooper yet, I stood in as the attacker, knowing I would replace myself with the other actor.  I brought a pop-up green screen for the shot of her driving away.  It went very smoothly, and then we drove about 30 minutes to the mailboxes.  Unfortunately, the mailboxes had been removed by the time we got there.  We shot the scene anyway, and I knew I would have to figure out a way to add them back in post.

Much later after I put together Hope’s part in the chapter, I reached out to my friend Vincent to play Cooper.  Hope and Vincent already knew each other, so it’s funny to me that they didn’t actually record anything together.

Vincent and I met up, and I planned on getting shots of him approaching the vehicle, but it was so hot outside that the camera(google Pixel 2) kept overheating and shutting down.  We opted to forgo those shots and went right to the action.  I brought a printout of the shot with Hope so I could try to match up the framing.  Then Vincent ran up, opened the door, and started swinging the hat at the imaginary car thief.

I drove the car away while Vincent recorded, then I drove back and recorded Vincent running after the car.  It gave me more flexibility for timing and framing in the edit.  The line “Son of Aegeus” was something I heard in a Jim Henson show called The Storyteller, the second season recounting Greek myths.  I really liked the sound of it, and I thought it was more interesting than having the character swear.

We grabbed the shot of Cooper walking towards the big sign, which was a day for night shot.  The lighting wasn’t too harsh, so the color correction was pretty easy.  We followed that up with recording his phone call.  We recorded it on the side of the road, so the sound of cars passing by was pervasive.  Later, we would record the dialogue over a discord call, and he sent me the files.  We had to figure out dialogue that would make any kind of sense with his gestures, and I think we did a good job.

He references the river Styx here, another reference to tie it all together.  I think the only issue with the voiceover is his wildly shifting accent.  We recorded over the course of a couple hours, so we didn’t really notice the slide.  But I didn’t feel like it was a big enough issue to justify re-recording everything all over.

I had to record separately the shot of the camera being placed into the mailbox.  I just used my own mailbox, but I had to record it a couple times.  I didn’t know what should be on the note Harper writes, so I recorded a temp shot and then later wrote the note and re-recorded it.

I recorded the guitar track at Mike Leavitt’s house, and he improvised the “electric guitar” track on his keyboard.  He recorded a couple different versions, and I pieced them together later.  The last song was by Ethan Anderson.  I messaged him that I needed a song, and sent him my test-edit that used a song from Ian Hubert’s “Dynamo”(A Million Different Words).  A few hours later he sent me an experiment.  I gave some notes, and we went back and forth a little, until he gave me the final piece.