Watching The Hunt For Gollum - which is quite possibly the most impressive fan film ever made - I can't help but think that if they can do that for just £3,000 (less than $5,000 Canadian) it's totally possible to make Bear Town on a small budget and make it look great.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it was only this past week that I finally saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. This is one of the funniest (and most famous) scenes in the movie; Indy has survived a mad chase/fight through the casbah only to be confronted by a big guy with an even bigger sword and some flashy skills. Exhausted and in no mood to fight, Indy pulls out his gun and shoots the sword-wielding bad guy dead.
Legend has it that this famous scene came about because Harrison Ford had a developed a terrible case of dysentery filming the movie in Tunisia. As scripted, the fight scene between Indy and the swordsman would have required three days to shoot, so Ford - presumably motivated by a desire to spend less time suffering in the heat and more time on the toilet - suggested "why don't I just shoot the guy?".
As the cliche says, necessity is the mother of invention.
This simple gag probably plays much better than whatever fight scene had been originally scripted and is a good example how simpler is almost always better. I was reminded of the "K.I.S.S." principle today while working on the Bear Town script on the way home from my office. The script was originally written as an independent feature and I have been carving it up in to small chunks that will work as 3-5 minute webisodes.
There are sections of the script I really don't like; the dialogue is clunky and the story doesn't feel like it flows naturally. I was really struggling to figure out how to make a couple scenes work tonight when it suddenly occurred to me that I could just cut them. That in turn inspired me to reorder a couple other scenes and eliminate a few more. In a span of fifteen minutes on the bus I probably cut thirty pages of script down to ten. Everything is much shorter, simpler and (most importantly) funnier.
Starting work on Bear Town again, it makes sense to start at the beginning. I have always been a fan of really creative opening sequences, especially the work of Kyle Cooper and his company Prologue Films. I've always had a bit of a block about what Bear Town's opening sequence should be like and so recently I have been looking for inspiration.
I went to see Juno last weekend and really loved its hand-drawn animated opening credits by Shadowplay Studio, which have been creating a lot of buzz on the internet lately (you can watch them above via YouTube, but a higher quality version can be found here).
Shadowplay also did the opening credits for Thank You For Smoking, which like Juno was also directed by Jason Reitman (for a higher quality version click here).
On the puppet podcasting front, I really like the titles/credits that Brian Hogg creates for his various podcasts. The dotBoom opening (above) is one of my favourites and the opening to his Inside Hoggworks video blog features some great use of typography.
I'm still not sure what I am going to do, but I have been playing with the idea of incorporating shadow puppets or at least a shadow puppet aesthetic. A few years ago I was involved with the development of a 2D digital puppetry system called Flash Puppet that allowed puppeteers to create Flash animation using puppetry for a proposed cable show called Suzie Shadow. The project never got green lighted, but it would be fun to play with the technology again.
I will have to think about this a little more. Until then, if like me you're interested in film titles and motion graphics, a great web site to visit is Forget The Film, Watch The Titles.
