Now Be Dragons

[gfish]

9 years ago, after making just two short, not very good movies, I talked friends into diving into a much more ambitious project. The film was called Now Be Dragons, a tale of the singularity as experienced by those who weren't uploaded. It was going to be about 70 minutes long, generally an order of magnitude more complicated than anything we had attempted. We ended up shooting maybe a 1/3 of the scenes, and then it all fell apart. In retrospect, the failure wasn't the worst thing in the world. The end result was not going to be all that great -- I had a lot to learn still about movie making. We did go on to do half a dozen more short projects, and the later ones were getting quite decent.

When unpacking last year, I came across the clipboard we had used at the time for making production notes. And tucked into the pad of paper was a 3.5" floppy labeled "continuity disk #1". I vaguely remembered that we had taken pictures of the sets for continuity purposes, using neuro42's digital camera that saved directly to floppy. Lost data, most exciting! Except the household didn't have a working floppy drive, so I set it aside to investigate later. Last week I finally took it into work and used one of the lab machines to get the images off.



I wanted several smooth dolly shots. Lacking a dolly, I used the old family wheelchair. It didn't work very well, but I still have the wheelchair sitting around. :P


The camcorder I was using was ridiculously ancient and didn't have a flip-out screen, just the eyepiece. Which made using it as a dolly very hard. So I did the only sensible thing and used my spare head-mounted display to see what the camera was shooting. This didn't work very well either, but it was pretty cool. (I was very serious about building a full wearable system around 1999. Had the HMD, the single-hand keyboard input, and the Ricochet wireless modem. It was not a spectacular success.)


To get a night shot, we needed some ambient light coming in through the window. Unfortunately, the window was up a floor and a half. So we rigged up a very precarious extended tripod. It fell over a couple of times.


We used cinefoil and a very bright daylight bulb. neuro42 and I were very serious.


Nope, I really haven't changed much in 9 years. On the right there is my first smartphone, a Visor PDA with Handspring phone attachment. It could send email, kind of. It was awesome.


The final lighting effect was actually one of the best things we accomplished. (vixyish and lolmike)


Sometimes a director just has to hit someone with a pillow. (Sorry, triskadekaphile.)

Comments

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

So who was your producer?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

In practical terms, I was. That wasn't a well defined position.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

That might have been some of the problems right there. Good producer = yay!

(I am biased on the subject, however.)

[slantiness.livejournal.com]

WOW. I LOOOOOVE finding "lost" data!!!!! Most exciting indeed!!!!!

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

I love it. This looks like it was a lot of fun.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Oh god, the HAT!