For this year we produce four films. A short documentary, a long documentary, a fiction piece and an experimental piece. Because I don’t like working in big groups I’m just sticking with Emma and Richard to do all of the projects. Emma is on producing/camera, phoning people and shouting at everyone and Richard is on editing/microphone, breaking computers and being shouted at. We just finished off the long documentary and now we’re moving onto the fiction piece which I’m hoping to base on a school shooting (fun stuff). But lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

For the short doc, we had to create a 3 minute piece about someone with an interesting life, personality or story to tell. Naturally, we chose to interview Peter ‘Pedro’ Brown, a 64 year old clown/journalist whose wife breathes fire. He was pretty awesome and after the interview juggled fire. For reasons no one cares about I can’t put the finished piece online but suffice to say it was fun experience.

For our larger doc, we needed to produce a 10 minute piece on one of a few subjects. So, being us, we agreed it would be perfectly logical to film it on airsoft weaponry (bb guns) and the crimes surrounding it. This took us on a pretty incredible journey (a pretty incredibly expensive journey that is). We met the Armed Response Unit of Lincolnshire (who were kind enough to fire live ammunition for us (MP5 and a Glock 17), Fire Support who deal airsoft weapons and run UKARA and Andy’s Airsoft who let us film an entire game (when it was pouring it down with rain).

Airsoft (opening sequence)

The best part was definitely the filming at Andy’s Airsoft. I rigged up one of my Sony HDV’s to a mask/helmet/thing with mad duct tape skills. It allowed us to film first person footage just like a real video game (wooow).

super hat-cam that totally wasn’t painful to wear or anything

I also managed to stab my thumb when trying to remove the camera in the middle of a firefight. I then proceeded to bleed all over Richard’s guns. THANKS RICHARD ;D

Next up was the fiction piece. I had big plans for this one. Big, awesome, bloody, plans. I wanted to film a 10 minute one-shot (no cuts) film that would follow a student trying to escape a school shooting. Lots of intense moments, dead bodies and impressive cinematography. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the location so we had to give up on that idea.. THEN me and the group had ideas about a series of skits or a sketch about war. We planned that for a whi-yeah we couldn’t get the location for that one either. Then I got bitter. Bitter about the industry, bitter about classmates, bitter about the standard of work my coursemates were producing and how we were only expected to meet those low, low standards. So I wrote a parody.

A Student Film

Believe me, there’s a lot more disdain behind this piece that you’d think. It’s aimed mostly at the people who see more student films than anyone else, teachers. I hope they like it. Hitting Bing with a car was the best part of making the film. It was also the most expensive. A majority of the cost of the shot went into buying clothes/mask for the stunt dummy filling in for Bing and the bribery of the car owner to let us roll a faux corpse of his bonnet. I most certainly lol’d. Outtakes coming soon.

The final project is an experimental film that’s due in May 14th. It’ll be up on YouTube shortly after then so keep an eye out. I can guarantee it’ll give you seizures.

- TomSka out

I study Media Production at the University of Lincoln. I’m currently in my second year and I’m studying two courses: TV production (multi cam) and Film production (single cam). Lemme tell you about them.

This is the class where we learn to make TV programs basically, anything that happens on a studio floor. Game shows, quiz shows, music shows, sitcoms, etc. We work in groups of roughly 15 and together we produce complete TV broadcasts. A project will start with everyone deciding on an idea and will end with the final live broadcast of it. We make the script, the set, hire the cast, operate the cameras, make the graphics and.. Well we do everything. The uni just provides the tools and grades us our performance.

For the first half of the semester we did a lot of warm up exercises. One of them was a simple music program that was had to set up. Nothing to crazy, just pick a song and get a band to play along to it and throw in an interview too. I took on the role of director for this mini-project because I knew I’d be too busy with other stuff to direct the bigger piece. So naturally, being the ass that I am, I decided to bet he first person ever to write/record a completely new track to be performed. So I did. This is how the project came out (i skipped the interview because it was boring and the sound quality was terrible):

After that, we started work on our 15 minute long ‘consumer affairs’ program. Basically we had to make one of those generic ‘exposing faulty/poor quality products’ shows but with a weird genre mixed in. The group chose horror. Our show was to be about a house of horrors where it’s inhabitants would come alive at night to assess poor quality products. Look, I didn’t write the script, okay?

For this project I was the ‘VT’ (video tape) director, meaning I was responsible for all the pre-recorded stuff that happened outside of the studio. It basically meant that all of my work actually happened before the live show. On the actual day that the show went live, I was just responsible for swapping out DVDs and pressing play. That would of course be a fairly simple process if the DVD player didn’t look like this:

Here’s one of the video inserts I produced for the project. It’s not the most interesting thing to watch ever but hey, that’s (british) showbiz.

The best part of the project was when Tim ‘Super Pervert‘ Nichols and one of our cameramen accidentally knocked over one of the cameras during a rehearsal, smashing a £2500 lens. What was funny about this was that the university was very forgiving over the camera smashing thing, what they flipped their lids over was the disrespectful and sarcastic nature of one of the students immediately after the camera had fallen over. The student? Me. The sarcasm? My misconstrued genuine apology on behalf the class. The penalty? One of the worst marks in the class. Awesome!

All in all, the project went well. It ran 2 minutes over schedule and we could’ve probably done with an extra rehearsal but everyone was happy with it and we got the highest mark out of all the groups. Even my ’second worst’ mark was still a 2-1 (kind of like a B+). This semester we have to put out a 30 minute program which the group has agreed will be a sitcom that I’ll be writing. Oh boy.

- TomSka out

Hello everyone! Sorry about the inactivity on this blog. I’ve been busy overeating and avoiding uni work. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. Anyway, lets get on with the procrastination post.

With the new decade comes a new asdfmovie. I’ve been promising to make this ever since the first and, 15 months later, here it finally is.

This time I worked with Edd (eddsworld) instead of James (pivotrj) to animate the short. This was mainly because me and Edd are closer as friends/workmates and I trusted him more as an animator to recreate the original aesthetic of the asdfcomics that inspired the films without any real reference material. All Edd got from me was the audio and an animatic (see below) accompanying it. Once he’d animated the skit he’d send over the Flash file and I’d touch up anything that looked a bit messy (i.e. mouths and consistency of line thicknesses).

The hardest part about making the film was definitely writing the skits. It sounds ridiculous but it could actually take up to an hour of deep concentration to think up a skit. Trying to be ‘random’ and original at the same time is a lot harder than you might think. Honestly, try thinking up something random without intentionally ripping anyone off, using pop-culture references or swearing and still be funny too. It takes both time and heavy amounts of real world inspiration. I asked for help from a lot of people including Thomas Costello and Casey Margolis. Of course, being a picky kind of guy I ended up only using my own ideas. Sorry, fellas.

One of Casey’s skits (fax machine) almost made it in but got cut when I was compiling the final version of the movie. The original length of the film was about 2:30 but after some consultation with the test-watchers quite a few got cut out. You can see them here in the deleted scenes:

But enough about making the film. Lets skip to the release.

I woke up at 7:50am on new years day with a nasty headache from a night of drinking that never happened so that I could submit asdfmovie2 just as YouTube ticked over to 2010. In case this doesn’t make sense to you, YouTube runs on Pacific Standard Time so midnight there on America’s west coast is 8am here in the UK. Suffice to say, the film went up exactly one minute into the new decade.. which was nice.

For a couple days everything was normal in the world of YouTube. The movie was getting views and all was well. Until suddenly:

Ashton Kutcher, creator of Punk’d and star of The Butterfly Effect and Dude, Where’s My Car? decided to recommend me to his four million Twitter followers. In short, I was a happy man.

So far that’s about all I can tell you about asdfmovie2. In the upcoming months you can look forward to the release of an animated music video for the song “Totally Gay”, a remix of the “raaaaainbows” skit produced by Stephen ‘sherbethead‘ Grant, by our friend Diwi.

Also I’m working on a poster for asdf2 that I might try and sell in the near future along with the poster I created for asdf1. Any takers?

Well I hope you all enjoyed asdfmovie2 and I look forward to making another one next year possibly maybe who knows. Thanks for the platinum opening week, everyone!

- TomSka out

After releasing MovieMakers, Edd was contacted by a woman named Isabel Morgan who asked if he would be willing to create a short film about climate change to help promote the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Naturally, being the environmental activists that Edd is, he agreed. Also they said they’d pay him.

Despite the fact that I said I’d be taking a break from writing Eddsworld after MovieMakers so that Edd could produce the next movie without my influence, Edd asked me to come back on board to help him with this project. Naturally, being the loving friend I am, I agreed. Also I read his emails so I knew there would be money.

We drafted a rough screenplay of the film and bounced it over to Isabel who promptly bounced it back with a list of all everything we’d gotten wrong about climate change. Who knew that the internet wasn’t the best way to research the issue? We then wrote a list of all the sound effects we’d need to record and a few weeks later when I was visiting Edd for Matt’s birthday we recorded a large chunk of them. Most of them were sounds from my mouth but a few just couldn’t be faked such as the water effects. Recording those looked a little like this:

That’s a microphone Edd is holding there with a sock on the end to avoid it getting wet. So yes, some of the sounds you hear in that film were me splashing around in a bath tub in Edd’s bathroom. The fun we have.

After that adventure, the rest of the film was pretty straight forward. Just voice acting and animation. We also had some of the music needed for the film ‘taken care of’ by our employers who hired Jack Benfield to compose some original tracks. Tracks I then sped up/reversed. Ha ha ha.

After everything was done and animated, we handed the film over to our commissioners and waited for the release.

But nothing could have prepared me for just what that release entailed..

When the day came, I traveled down to London via a fun filled four hour train ride, met up with Edd and set off to the venue. Expecting to walk into a grim office with gray walls and a small analog TV playing our movie in 4:3 I was blown away when we stepped into a full blown champagne reception, complete with catering staff, canapés and possibly even light jazz. Oh, there was also a wall made of glass that went from frosted to transparent with the press of a button. Astounding. There we met Cheryl Campbell, a partner of Isabel, who introduced us to her two sons. These guys turned out to be the entire reason we were there.

It turned out that while Cheryl was desperately trying to figure out how to appeal to the youth of today, her sons were browsing YouTube and laughing loud enough to draw her attention. This apparently got her thinking. She asked her sons to write a list of their favourite channels. At the top of that list? Eddsworld. The rest is pretty self explanatory.

So there we were, drinking champagne in the poshest part of London at the premier of a film that existed simply because two young fans recommended us to their mum. Incredible. Also at the event was Mike Tapscott (TedCrusty) who too made it on the list. Mike makes fake virals which are made so intentionally poorly that they do in fact go viral. One of his films, Man thrown out Rollercoaster in Horrific Accident, has recieved a horrific eight million views. Keshen Matus (CustardProductions) was another filmmaker involved in the project whose work we saw that night.

An awesome TedCrusty compilation

After the screening of the films, we mingled with journalists, producers and other people wearing ties, It was one of the most surreal nights of my life. So once again, I thank Cheryl Campbell, her sons, Isabel Morgan and everyone else who invited us to become involved with the project. It was quite simply full of win.

Also, thanks to Calum ‘the wonderboy’ Fuller, the whole story got picked up by the BBC and we got our own radio and TV segment. Awesome!

Thanks, Calum!

More on the project: joshwelsh.wordpress.com – tve.org – panda.org

Now, as if solving the worlds environment wasn’t enough, I’ve also been busy cleaning up the streets. Oli, a friend of mine and reoccurring character in my films, let me know about a job for the National Policing Improvement Agency to produce a sort of training film about the methods drug dealers use to communicate. Sounded fun. Sounded like a mini Guy Ritchie film waiting to happen.

After an interview with my potential employers, they asked me to put together a demo reel and a quote for how much I’d be charging for the film. With a surprising amount of difficulty I wrote down how much the film would cost to make and put together demo reel. I sent it off and waited to hear back.

Demo Reel

A few weeks later I got an email me telling me I had the job. Turns out I’d quoted less than the other production companies I was up against. Thousands less. Hah. Since then I’ve been signing contracts, hiring actors and filming on locations with lights and everything. How professional. I obviously won’t be releasing this film anywhere online ever because we wouldn’t want drug dealers knowing that we know what they know now would we? The title shot (above) is all I dare show. It’s good to be connected. Thanks Oli!

Now, which problem should I solve next?

Maybe poverty.

- TomSka out

So about 21 hours ago I was standing at the doors of my local Game with a controller in my pocket and a headset on my.. well.. head.. (for no reason other than that I had accidentally brought them with me) waiting for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Mm.. Logical titling.

At around two minutes past midnight I walked out of the shop with the first copy of the game sold. The nice people in the queue loudly jeered and commented upon my sheer nerdiness but I couldn’t care less because they were about to spend the next hour waiting in the freezing cold for the very same object I now held in my hands. What a bunch of losers.

About an hour into the game I came to what Charlie Brooker had called an “upsetting, chilling and horrifying” mission. Playing an undercover agent posing as a terrorist, you and your terrorchums slowly plod (the game insists you walk at the pace of a crippled slug) through Moscow Airport with light machine guns plowing through every single innocent civilian that fails to use their best friend as a human shield.

“Is that an M240 in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Haha, just kidding, enjoy your flight sir”

To be honest, I found it relatively tame in comparison to a few of the missions in Hitman: Blood Money (one of my favourite games) in which you’re free to seek out and murder every living soul within a mile radius of your target using anything from shotguns to shovels. It just wasn’t the harrowing experience I was promised. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I have become desensitized to violence.. I mean.. Wow.. What have I become.. I can’t even feel love anymo-

HAHAHA TAKE THAT FOREIGN PEOPLE

But anyway. I also enjoyed the mission “Whiskey Hotel” set at The White House because despite never being there, having played “Amendment XXV” on Hitman: Blood Money I actually knew my way around the place. That’s why it was weird to be shooting everything in sight and NOT be failing the mission.

The final thing that really took my interest in the game was the use of your hands. That sounds odd but allow me to explain. Although you do indeed spend most of your time hugging a gun, your hands frequently enter the frame and the gameplay in general. On one mission start off scaling an icy cliff face. Suddenly you’re expected to press the right and left triggers to stab into said cliff to steadily hoist yourself up. Another mission you crawl towards a gun and again you’re using the triggers to control each arm as you drag yourself along the ground. This, to my mind, makes the game incredibly immersive. I found myself right up close to the TV really feeling like I was a part of the action. The Half Life series is said to be the top dog when it comes to total character immersion as you never speak and you see everything through a first person that you can control but in my opinion Modern Warfare 2 does a far greater job by actually making your hands and the rest of your body a reoccurring element in the game.

However, what I didn’t like about the game that it had around the same amount of story/playability as ODST. I finished it after about 5-6 hours and felt that the ending came way too soon. The final missions were moderately anti-climactic and although the ending was very cinematic it was a little TOO similar to its prequel. The whole wounded and barely conscious on the floor routine followed by a dramatic slow motion kill shot. I can appreciate the poetry of ending the sequel the same way as the first but it’s just a bit of a cop out really.

Overall, I found the storyline and gameplay to be highly enjoyable and the reason I finished it so fast was probably because I just couldn’t tear myself away. I recommend it to anyone who has thus far failed to see the appeal of first person shooters as it’s the best I’ve ever played and personally think it’s a work of gaming art.

See you on Team Deathmatch!

- TomSka out

Okay so it’s been a good five months since I blogged. I best get on with it.

On September 22nd, at 00:01am I purchased one of the first copies of Halo 3: ODST available in the world. Why? Because I really had nothing better to do. The game is a sort of prequel to Halo 3 as it is set between the second and third installment in the series. Here’s a trailer!

If you have both good hearing and taste in entertainment you may have noticed the voice acting in that trailer. Well, that’s because the game is voiced almost entirely by cast members from Firefly/Serenity (see my post on the show/movie here) and Battlestar Galactica. If that still means nothing to you, here is a handy reference:

Seeing as I once spent two hours trying to keep a marine voiced by Adam Baldwin (far left) alive during the campaign on Halo 3, you can imagine how much I enjoyed playing a game with the same actor this time playing a main character. The game is slated for being ridiculously short, but hey, it is what it is. A tie-in. A spin-off. What it lacks in length it makes up for in actually enjoyable character development and amazing aesthetics. The game also comes with a new mode of multiplayer: Firefight. A survival mode in which the game throws you (and up to three of your.. uh.. friends) wave after wave of increasingly tough to kill enemies. I’m yet to play a game online that hasn’t required me to wait a up to a second before my character responds to my controller but LAN (that’s when you play with real people who are really in the room you’re in) games and split screen have worked just fine. In fact, we got good enough to accomplish the two hour non-stop unpauseable marathon achievement “Endure” in which you just have to make it through around 60 waves of enemies. Getting this achievement meant that Richard finally got Recon armour for Halo 3. If you know that is.. well.. you know it’s full of win.

Also, because I went to the midnight release with Max, I got the limited edition 360 controller you saw at the start of the post. So yeah. Hahaha.

Yes.

- TomSka out

Hey, everyone. This is an update I haven’t felt the need to rush because CakeBomb has been down for quite a while now but here it is! This is my latest film: Standoffish.

Around 3 months ago I noticed a poster around campus that was promoting the Virgin Media Shorts film competition (link). The rules were simple; create a short film that was 2 minutes and 20 seconds long (i’ll admit, i skimmed past the part that stated the film needed to be entirely free from violence and swearing).

I work best when I’m given at least one guideline (such as a time span) so the film’s concept came really easily. However, I’m not a writer, nor am I particularly gifted at writing screenplays. This is why I called in Bown (seen wielding a shotgun) to help me write the dialogue and form the screenplay. We went through about 3-4 drafts until we came to the final version. Incompatible actors and unrealistic expectancies demanded this. I decided to go without a storyboard for film as I wanted to experiment with improvised cinematography to capture unpredictable drama that Standoffish is all about. This meant that I set up Emma (camera) and Mina (boom mic) at different places in the room and told them to catch the action as we went through the whole performance around 20 times. I admit, however, that I failed to establish enough over-the-shoulder shots so a lot of dialogue was heard through cutaways or seen from angles I wasn’t entirely happy with. Despite that, I’m pleased with how everything turned out. The film got a lot of criticism for the poor quality of acting but hey, we’re media students, not actors.

It took me a good 2 months to get around to actually editing the film (i was busy procrastinating). But as soon as it was finished, I uploaded it straight to the Virgin Media Shorts site. It was the morning of the deadline, after all. Check it out here. If you could register on the site and vote/comment on the video, I’d really appreciate it. Although, I don’t really expect to win. It wasn’t until after I’d started the project that I realised last years winner was a film I’d even seen on TV. But hey, we do it for the experience, not the glory. (the money helps too).

I’d like to thank Emma and Richard for providing their airsoft guns for the film. If you live in the Lincolnshire area and you’re looking for gun props for your film, you can rent them from Emma/Richard. Check them out here. Stephen Grant once again deserves a thanks as he once again selflessly created a soundtrack for me. Speaking of which, he’s currently in the process of forging an alternative soundtrack to LifeHack, my previous film, as it may be entered into the Royal Television Society Award and we can’t submit it with it’s current, copyrighted, audio.

So. What else have I been up to? Well, as previously stated, I’ve been procrastinating a great deal. TomSka’s Day Out 3 was filmed not soon after Standoffish and is still awaiting editing. I’ll get to it very soon.. I just have a lot of things to do first.. Such as tidying my desk and.. Those other things. Have a taster from the film to tide you over for now!

We’re also in the middle of creating a commissioned Eddsworld project for the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009. It’s a pretty awesome opportunity as it means a lot of people who wear ties will see our work and possibly even smile. Maybe.

Finally, I recently had the opportunity to appear on a so-late-night-it-was-early-morning internet talk show. The show is called LuvChat and is primarily sponsored by a ‘male enhancement’ product. But don’t let that fool you, it was actually a really awesome and intense operation they have going. I was scheduled to appear on the show at 8-10pm L.A. (west coast USA) time. That meant that I had to stay awake until 5am. It was pretty tough. By the end of it I was getting pretty tired and couldn’t think.. good. But still, it was a fun experience. Check out the show sometime, it’s always looping the previous night’s show. (link)

So yeah, that concludes this excessively long blog post! There’s many other projects I have on the way (including Diwi, The Viking, my cousins, the cast of Standoffish and more) so I’ll be sure to keep you all informed as they develop.

- TomSka out

Now, upon first reading this comic. You may not notice just how unfunny it is. But that’s why you need to take into consideration a few basic rules of single panel comics.

Both the illustration and the caption should work together to contribute to the punchline of the comic. One way it can do this is by adding on a secondary punchline to a joke previously made in the illustration that most likely makes the first joke funnier. Does this comic do that? No. The illustration isn’t funny. It’s just a man being harassed about how he’s obviously removed a wedding ring recently. That makes us assume that this man is lying to this woman about his marital status. The caption simply confirms this.

Now, alternatively, the caption could completely juxtapose the illustration and blow away any preconceptions/assumptions/conclusions that the image has caused us to develop. Does this comic do that? No! As I said before, we’ve been set up to assume that this man is lying about his marital status to this woman. Therefore, it would be funny if the caption were to show that we’d actually gotten the wrong idea about the situation. Afterall, that’s the most basic formula of comedy. Something unexpected happening. Zach Weiner, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sums this concept up here:

But, as I’ve previously stated, this comic fails to do even that. The caption simply explains the unfunny reasoning behind the illustration. I mean, really. It wouldn’t be hard to turn the joke around and give it an unexpected twist. Watch!

See? That’s not even funny. But at least it’s actually a joke now.

Anyway, after reading the comic, I felt compelled to put an end to what I’m sure had been a long and drawn out series of mindless, politically correct, bourgeois drivel that someone had incorrectly labeled a ‘comic’. So, I wrote an email to the creator.

“Hello there.

After reading your comic published on Monday the 29th I am requesting that you cease all forms of comedic-creativity for as long as you may live. This piece makes it clear that you have no understanding of the most basic rules of comedy and that you are potentially the least funny comic artist in the world. I would try and explain the concepts of juxtaposition and irony to you but in my heart I know that anyone capable of forging such a damp display of wit is already too far gone to be saved. The fact is simple, you are doing only bad things to the world of humour. Your work serves only to help in continuously lowering the bar of what is deemed amusing by the masses. If you have any respect for the medium that I’m sure you once appreciated then you’ll do the right thing and end your career here.

Thank you.”

________________________________________________________________

Within minutes I received my reply.

“Thank you for you e-mail. I have to say, that out of the hundreds of e-mails received about this cartoon, yours was the only one complaining about it. The other 400 or more liked the cartoon very much, and many people paid to have reprints of the cartoon.

As for the ending of Mr. McPherson’s career, his calendars and greeting cards continue to be top-selling items. Though obviously everyone’s sense of humor varies, yours appears to be simply out of synch with the millions of fans that follow Close To Home. Don’t you get that? Apparently not.

In the future, you need simply not to read Close To Home to prevent being bothered by it’s style of humor. If you do keep reading it, it clearly means that something about it appeals to you on some level.

Regards,

Chris Millis
Associate to Mr. McPherson”

________________________________________________________________

Well, everyone, there you have it. If “400 or more liked the cartoon” so much that they wrote in to compliment the creator and the rest of those “millions of fans” just sat back and laughed at a joke that simply wasn’t there then I guess I’m too late. Humanity is doomed. Comedy is dead.

But if you’re reading this; you are the resistance. Don’t let them win. Burn your newspapers. Burn them before the evil contained within their brittle pages can be released. Don’t read the funnies.

I repeat.

DO.

NOT.

READ.

THE FUNNIES.

- TomSka out

Now, about 4 out of 5 people can tell it’s not real and love nothing more than excitedly pounding “FAKE!!” into the comments box; but for the few people I managed to fool, even just for a moment, here’s how I did it.

Taking inspiration from a majority of viral videos (which are typically filmed on a whim) I used my mobile phone to film the video instead of an expensive camera. People have tried to fake virals by using high quality cameras and then compressing the video until it looks crappy, but you just can’t fake that blurry framerate and sound quality that you get from a mobile phone.

We used our latest stunt dummy Blondie (the predecessor of dummies Jenny and Albi) for the actual falling body.

Blondie, although being the one prop that made this video possible, was no doubt the reason the film ended up looking so fake. The shoulder joints in the duct-tape + newspaper body weren’t loose enough and made the body too stiff in places and too floppy in others.

Then we come to the editing. A lot of people have their own theories on how it was put together, my favourite of which being that Mat managed to run down the stairs and swap himself with the stunt dummy in the 2 seconds spent running and towards it. The video is actually just made up of 2 simple cuts and sound sound engineering.

The first cut is here:

This pan cut is here so that we could dress Blondie in Mat’s clothes and prepare the throw.

The second cut is not at 00:15 seconds, when Blondie passes through the shadow as many people have theorised but actually 4 seconds later after we’ve run over to the dummy.

The audio of the video, such as the laughter and impact noise, was mostly made up of sound from various other takes. I also recorded Mat jumping off a small wall going “oh fu-” (heard at 00:14) in an attempt to put a little life into the tumbling torso. Of course, this swear could easily be misinterpreted as a contribution from a bystander.

The final element I added to the video was the inclusion of an opening title from Windows Movie Maker. I did this as an homage to all the amateur videos put out on the web (although it also serves to lower your technical expectations of the video before it’s even begun, hopefully making it easier to believe it’s real and unedited).

So yeah, that’s the surprisingly intense reasoning behind a stupid video of a guy jumping off a ledge and missing his mark.

I’ll fool you all next time though.

- TomSka out

p.s.

Okay, actually, none of it ever happened; except for the part where people’s privacy was invaded and their photographs were downloaded without their knowledge.

LifeHack is based on an old pastime of mine in which I’d use the Peer2Peer software Limewire to download the photographs of people foolish enough to share their ‘My Documents’ folder. In fact, the photographs you see flicker past on the screen of the laptop are photos of real people that I’ve downloaded. Now, before you try and get me arrested, it’s (theoretically) totally legal. None of the images are copyright material and the people (even if they didn’t know it) put the files up for download themselves.

Although, making a blog to showcase said photographs may have been a step too far

Played by crew and classmate Chris Rankin, LeafNode is a smarmy hacker who is prone to staying indoors. To create this character, I needed to find/buy a lot of props. Some of which Chris provided himself and some that I had to buy. This included the scarf, cape, comic and cans of energy drink. I spent around £40 on getting Chris to look the way I wanted.

Chris IS a prefect, you know.

I worked with Emma Price (camera), Dawn Papworth (boom mic) and Chris to create the film. We also had the help from around 14 extra cast members to bring life into the movie.

I must admit, a few special thanks and apologies are in order:

Thank you, Mat Johns for allowing me to set you on fire for a shot we wound up cutting out of the film. I hope you enjoy your scar! (think of it as a ‘tom-scar’ lololol)

“Totally worth it”

Thank you, Richard (and Emma) for providing all your guns and police gear for the film as well as allowing me to tape your wide-angle lens to my camera for the party time-lapse shot.

A big apology is in order for Dawn, our sound recordist. Because of a big mess-up during editing, mostly all of the audio was lost and I didn’t have time to rerecord. Hence the film winding up sounding more like a music video than a short film.

I don’t have any more photos of Dawn so here is an artists rendering of Dawn (thanks again Richard). Dawn likes dragons.

I’d also like to thank Amy who took over and slept in my bed the night before the deadline so that I wouldn’t be able to stop editing and fall asleep.

Overall, every part of making this film was fun. I enjoyed working with a large group of people, trying new filming/editing techniques and generally riding the adrenaline rush that only comes from trying to meet a deadline and create a good movie at the same time.

Thank you everyone who helped make this possible!

Especially you, Calum!

- TomSka out