I've been working on getting some behind the scenes video out, but we'll probably be saving those for later, so here's some production notes:
I started putting together
The Competition about a year ago. I really wanted to do a web series that was not a sitcom or a dramedy or anything involving 20-somethings sitting in rooms talking about relationships. I love that stuff, but I really wanted to work on a genre series, which is something that has been lacking on the Internet as of late. Last July I had the pleasure of sitting down and
interviewing Stu Maschwitz, author of
The DV Rebel's Guide. Stu is a big advocate of the idea that small budgets shouldn't necessary mean small production value. We talked a lot about video podcasts and how they were mostly non-fiction content. I lamented the fact that I had yet to subscribe to a video podcast that was a sci-fi serial, in the grand tradition of Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, etc. So I decided to do something about it. While I was writing, I started working on some
concept designs for the series in Apple's Motion.
But then, as can happen to labors of love, life intervened and I didn't get to serious work on the series again until the early part of summer '08. To get myself and others psyched I put up a
teaser trailer including some elements I had worked on in '07. The good thing about the year long break was that I had spent a lot of time with the story and had a much better sense of where I wanted it to go and, more importantly, where I wanted it to start.
Timur Civan and I had worked on a (now kind of embarassing)
video at my school back in 2004 and had been talking about working together again for years. So Timur and I, along with my good friend Ben Naidus got together at my apartment a few weeks ago and shot the pilot on a zero budget. Thank god Timur had been working all these years and had accumulated quite the portable studio and the experience and technique to go with it. We shot on Timur's HVX, with a minimal amount of setups in my bedroom. We maximized those setups by switching between a number of Timur's beautiful Canon primes and doing very long takes. The interior scenes in the bedroom were lit solely with a 500-watt lightbox set very close to Ben and the scribbled-on wall. We had a 300-watt light down on the balcony below my room to get the silouhette on Ben's face, and later on when he comes out to the balcony. That light was also shined through the balcony windows for the middle shots.
We ended up with about 20 minutes of footage. I had decided to shoot in the HVX's native 720p mode early on, since I knew I'd be editing on a 4-year old G5 and hard drive space was scarce on my rig at the moment. I also knew that the highest res we could deliver on Vimeo was 720p. A good thing to know is that Vimeo's HD player always plays at 24fps, so it was good to go native all the way through.
Nearly all of the post was handled through Final Cut. I used a combination of Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista for the color grading. Colorista was especially helpful in setting up vignettes for detailed corrections. All of the titles and the reveal of the fireball in the sky were done in Motion, which isn't known for this kind of work but proved very able in setting up complicated particle simulations and 3D camera movement. The sound design of The Accelerator was completed in Soundtrack Pro. Compression to iPod and HD formats went through Apple's Compressor. This was definitely a Final Cut Suite production.
All in all, we were able to get the principal photography and post done at lightning speed thanks to a year of latent pre-production and some solid tools. I think it's a testament to the endurance of old Macs that I was able to so quickly work on this 720p material, even on what some would say is an ancient workstation.
Episode 2 and 3 are currently in production. I'm trying to bring in some different directors to mix things up. Timur has tentatively agreed to direct an episode, but that guy is pretty busy!