Friday, July 18, 2008

IT'S UP!

Here it is, the Niteskool 2008 Music Video, Sylvia II!!!


Butterfly Assassins - Sylvia II from Chris Amos on Vimeo.

Again, a big thank you to everyone who helped out, and everyone who's seen this project through with us. Hope you enjoy the video! We'll be keeping you posted on festivals, and the video's progress from here on out, so keep checking in with us!

-Rob and Chris

Saturday, June 14, 2008

WEBISODE 3: Filming the band

Some clips of the band sequence being filmed - enjoy!

Friday, May 9, 2008

Production Complete!

We finished filming the video this past weekend, and we are now entering the post production stages. The shoot was extremely fun, but with very long hours. We worked from 10 am until 5:30 am on Friday, 6 am on Saturday (Sunday morning), and 10 am on Sunday (Monday morning). All the hard hours put into the shoot are going to pay off with the final product for sure. Even with extensive camera issues, we were able to film essentially everything that we originally wanted to. We are all extremely excited to see where the editing takes us in the next week or so! Below are some pictures from set prior to, and as we filmed! Hope you enjoy them!




Here's a picture of our finished spring set. We used 80 rolls of sod for the ground layer, and hung a 20 foot backdrop from the ceiling. In order to get a tree that looked something close to real, we purchased a bare red oak tree, and literally taped fake leaves all over it, and painted it brown. Somehow it turned out well...



Here's a picture of the room that the video opens in. On the left is our Sylvia (Elly Lachman, Northwestern '09), and on the right is Thax Douglas, our "Father Time" character. In the picture below this one, the band is pictured in the same room with a pretty drastic lighting change.




Below is a picture of our finished "Winter Set". Basically just a polished version (with snow!) of the walls we put up in one of the posts below!



Those pictures pretty much cover the set that was constructed for the project, so I will just put up a few pictures down below from behind the scenes. We will keep you updated as post production moves along, and we get some more pictures back from on set! Thanks for checking up on us!



Here's our beloved camera team, namely THE David Lassiter (Northwestern, '07) operating our Arriflex SR3 hi-speed camera.



Here is the 16-foot jib arm that we rented. There are some pretty great shots that we got with this baby. It allowed us to go from the ceiling of the warehouse, swoop around the band, and then immediately back upwards. Pretty cool stuff.




Finally, here's a picture of a little dolly action behind the scenes on the winter set. We were able to use a Chapman Hybrid dolly, with a ton of track to get some pretty smooth, long shots.



There's a pretty sweet picture of the band rocking out...



and...



and...finally...



the little thing you see on the left is our SFX technician (about 3 feet away from the explosions) manually blowing up 4 bombs placed underneath our sod ramp...THAT was cool. And it was also at 6:45 AM.


So, once again, thanks for checking this out, and hope you enjoy the pictures. We are all so excited about how the shoot turned out, and are excited to check out the footage this upcoming week!


- Chris Amos (Director)

Saturday, April 26, 2008

More Construction!

We've made some pretty solid progress in the past couple days for the construction of our set. Today we were able to put up and brace all of the walls for our "winter world", along with 2 of the walls for the room where the opening sequence, and band sequence occur! We rented a scissor lift that reaches up to 26 feet, which has been pretty awesome to work with.

Below is a picture of us putting up the 4th panel of the first building for the winter set. This will be painted tomorrow to resemble a warm gray sandstone building with some soot across it.



Below is a picture of the scissor lift in action that we've been using, in addition to a picture of the "brick" wall that is placed next to the stone one:





The final thing that we accomplished today was the construction of two of the walls creating the cabin like interior of the room bordering the winter world:



And finally, a shot from the other side of this wall; we constructed a functioning wooden door to go between the room and what is to be the city sidewalk:



More pictures are on the way, as we continue building the set. The next couple days should be really exciting, as the set will start developing much more on the artistic level!

- Chris Amos '10: Director

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Construction Has Begun!

We have recently begun the construction of our set! We moved into a 2500 sq. ft. warehouse this past Tuesday in Waukegan. All of our lumber was delivered this Tuesday as well, and we have been working really hard nonstop. Since then, we have framed out almost the entire set. Below is one of the blueprints for one of the walls for the opening room / room where the band sequence takes place:



Here is the basic frame with studs for this wall, built in the warehouse. It measures 12 x 12 x 12 feet:



This is only one of several walls we have built so far, and this is only the beginning of the set itself. Here's a picture of me (Chris Amos), Rob Runyeon, and Trevor Ewen, one of the members of the build crew, constructing a fully functioning door to be placed on one of the walls of the room:



3 of these walls put together (with the frame for a window in one, and a door in the other) makes a pretty cool looking start to a room. Below is a picture of the 3 walls, all propped against the wall of the warehouse. It gives a good gauge of the sheer size of these rooms. Having 12 foot tall walls for such a small room is going to give a really awesome look to this scene. The look is designed to be a Tim Burton - esque, fairy tale environment. It's a little blurry, but again, it gives a good look.



The rest of the work this Tuesday went towards designing and constructing the walls that will eventually be assembled together to form the front of the buildings in the winter world. Check out the post below this one if you haven't familiarized yourself with what these buildings are going to look like! It is taking about 12 of these sections to create the environment we are looking for. Each one of these measures 16 feet in height, and are going to turn into 2 story building facades.





Thanks a lot for checking this out, and we'll keep you posted throughout the week as we continue to build the set!

- Chris Amos '10: Director

Monday, April 7, 2008

Our Set

Posted below are some photos taken of a 3-D scale model that Aaron Menninga (Northwestern '09) has built.


The section on the right side here is a winter village that will be shot in the vein of Sweeney Todd. The buildings will be 16 feet high, and will run for about 50 feet long. The face of the brick buildng will be with sheets of ZBrick, a texture pattern similar to a thin wood (luan). The rest of it has been designed similar to the frame of a real house, with 2x4's and 1x4's, but the face will be luan, painted over to resemble a building from 19th century Europe. Here's an up close look at it:





And below here is the spring world, which will be constructed of patches of grass on top of luan, curving upwards, creating the forced perspective of a receding path to a small house on the skyline. The sky will be a large, 40 foot long backdrop, and the tree will be an actual tree full of leaves.





Finally, between these two worlds, there will be a simple and barren room, where the opening scene will occur, and the band will be performing in. In the finished set there will be peeling wallpaper going down the sides, and snow falling outside the window:



Oh, and the entire set is going to blow up...

- Chris Amos '10 - Director

Sunday, April 6, 2008

WEBISODE 2: CASTING

We made a video about the casting we did over the weekend. Enjoy!





- Alex Leibowich '11