CPSC 808 Project 2: BAD APPLE

Josh Greene, Ponnoreay Pich, and Michael Speth

 

Description:

The second project in CPSC 808 required us to create a video. We could select any story we wanted, but it had to be well thought out, coherent, and follow the production process that was laid out in the description document. The reason for doing this was to prepare us for the animation video we will have to do in this class. This means that we had to plan the video very carefully and could not have too many on site improvisions (although some did occur during shooting and editing). Improvisions are more easily handled in live video editing and often lead to wonderful/memorable shots (i.e. Indiana Jones shooting the sword twirling bad guy in the first movie when the original plan was to have a big fight sequence), but a lot harder with an animated film due to the amount of work necessary to change animation. The result of all of our "planning" is a little film called Bad Apple. Below is a breakdown of the cast:

             Main Characters                                                        Supporting Characters (Minions)

                      Boss: Armond Honore                                          Nicademis of the High Belt Clan: Nick Kinerd

                                                               

                    Good Male: Michael Speth                                        Cut-Ball-Li, Killer of 3000 Men: Bryan Smith

                                                                    

Good Female: Amanda Hodge                                                     Blinky: Cecilia Carroll

                                                                   

Video:

Drawing on our love and passion for martial arts films, anime, and video games, we decided to create a spoof of bad kung-fu movies. Here is a link to the video files in several formats (.mov and .avi).  The Divx codec may be required to play it in Windows.

Script:

Michael Speth came up with the original story idea, and working together, Ponnoreay and Michael wrote the original script, basing the story on the Marital Arts genre of films, video games and anime. Revisions to the script were then handled by Ponnoreay (mainly because he could spell really well and had a semi-firm grasp of the English language's grammar rules). The revisions were made to create better flow to the story and add more humor where it was possible.

Storyboards:

Michael drew up the storyboards (with Ponnoreay and Josh's inputs) since he had the most artistic skills of the whole group; basing the shots on the scene sequence laid out in the script. Revisions were made according to the changes made in the script and to correct an error we made due to confusion over how to layout the storyboards.

OS / Tools:

The entire movie was developed on a Linux System. Mike has a really nice setup (LCD Monitor, etc.), so of course we took advantage of it.  We also wanted to make sure and note that while Linux turned out to fit our needs well; it took many hours to compile and install all the tools.  The tools used to create the project include:

There is also a really good tutorial that covers the entire process of video editing at: http://www.robfisher.net/video/.

Video Credits:

Problems and Changes

One problem that immediately struck us was the short deadline we had to complete this project (approximately two weeks). The original script for the video called for quite a few more minions than the final product, but it would have been extremely difficult to get that many people together for shooting during a time frame where everyone was free from class. It was actually extremely lucky of us that some of the Chidokwan Karate club members were free during the day we wanted to do some shooting.

The script called for a final confrontation between the Good Male and the Boss with the Good Male beating the Boss using Drunken Kung-Fu, but no matter how drunk we got Michael, he just couldn't learn the technique within the time frame given. This all worked out in the end though since during editing, we found that we had quite a bit of footage already for our "short video."

A lot of problems were encountered during the post-production stage of the project; many of it due to us not knowing how to do what we wanted in Cinelerra. At one point, we almost lost an entire day's worth of editing by accident. After that, we backed up the entire working directory whenever we wanted to try anything new.

The microphone we used to capture voices for the actors wasn't very good, but fortunately since our video was supposed to be a bad Kung-Fu spoof, it actually worked out in the end. Dr. Davis did point out that we could have used the camera's microphone, which would have been better, so that's probably what we're going to use in the animated video later on.

Special thanks also should go to Stuart Morris for creating the Flash animation at the top of the page.