Your patience has been rewarded. Here, at long last, is the tower top behind the scenes video.

Behind the Scenes of the iSundae II Tower Top Scene from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

You can also watch the video on YouTube.

This is the last behind the scenes article we have planned. Is there anything that you want to know about from iSundae II? Leave a comment and tell us, and we’ll see if we can accommodate you.

The Two Big Ones

Let’s start out with the two best transitions you could ever use. The cross dissolve and the fade in/out dissolve. Both of these transitions have certain meanings to movie-goers:

A cross dissolve tells the audience that the scene has changed.

A fade in/out dissolve means that time has passed. It can also be used to show a scene change, but generally a cross dissolve is used for that.

In the early days of film, the goal was to make the movie look as much like a play as possible. So when the scene was over, the film editors would use cross dissolves to replace the curtain. Watch an old movie from the 1930s or early ’40s, and you’ll see what I mean.

What use do these two have today? Considerably less than they did back then. Nowadays, our goal is not to create the feel of a play, but to draw the viewer into the story. Watch a recent movie and notice the difference. Try counting and comparing the number of transitions between a movie made in the 1930s, and a movie made in the 21st century.

Putting these to use is pretty easy. Not! Fight the urge to use them every chance you get. Do hard cuts first, then use a short cross dissolve to soften the cuts that are too hard. Most of the time, you won’t need a transition at all. Part of this is good scripting and shooting. 

The Cheesy Ones

Take a look at the list of available transitions for your editing software. I see things like wipe, stretch, slide, and 3D simulation. Here’s a short video of a few of them:

Cheesy Transitions from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Pretty awful, aren’t they? “No,” you say, “I think they look cool!” At what price? Your job as a filmmaker is to draw the audience in, not snap them out of their enjoyment to think about that cool transition. Save “cool” for the special effects that drive the story. 

Plain and simple, don’t use those very often, if at all. “But I’ll never get to use them then!” you complain. Hold on, stay with me. They have their place.

Put the Cheesy Ones to Good Use

While cheesy transitions don’t work well in movies, TV shows use them all the time to spice up some of the more boring content. You guessed it, I have an example.

Watch a few episodes of Good Eats on Food Network. Don’t worry, it’s a great show. Notice their fancy use of fun (and cool) transitions, such as the radial effect to show the passing of time. Also, watch for the unseen transitions. I know, that sounds crazy. How can you see something unseen? I’m talking about the transitions that happen when Alton Brown’s frying pan fills the screen, only to be set down again in a different setting. They do all sorts of variations on this one, so keep your eyes open.

I’ll leave you with a repeat of something I said earlier in this post. Make all your cuts hard cuts, and then watch the whole movie. Don’t add any transitions until you’ve seen a cut without one first. Then think about it carefully before you try a transition. Remember, a little goes a long way.

So what am I talking about? Well, let’s take the very basic example of a character who is supposed to be happy. You really have only a couple of options.

Spelling it all out in the dialogue

Your character goes around saying, “I’m happy!” or another character tells him that he’s happy. Either way, you end up coming across as talking down to the audience, telling them exactly what’s going on when you could be…

Showing it

With this method, your character walks around showing his happiness. He smiles, he waves to people on his morning walk. He shrugs and laughs when his cup of coffee falls out the window on the bus. Obviously, this guy is so happy, he can’t contain it.

When you show the audience what the character is feeling, you let them figure it out. They get the point better because they aren’t thinking about how cheesy that last line was.

Now, the example of a happy character was extremely simple. This technique can (and should) be applied to almost everything. Say your character wants to sneak into a building. On one end we have…

“Hello! I’m sneaking!”

The character walks up to everybody he meets while sneaking and basically tells them to be quiet because he is sneaking into that building over there. Keep in mind that this is exactly what Elmer Fudd is doing every time he says, “Be vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits!” Of course, he’s supposed to be stupid, so it works. The complete opposite is…

“Real” sneaking

A much better approach is to do two things.

First, have your character actually sneak around, avoiding people, and generally giving the idea that he doesn’t want to be caught. Consider having him almost be caught, but then he gets away just in time. This will further cement the sneaking in the audience’s mind.

Second, shoot from sneaky-looking angles, and get lots of close-ups of both the sneaking character and the guards/villain. Make sure to throw in a couple longer shots, too. Then edit the scene by starting with longer shots, then cut quicker when the action is happening, and then return to longer cuts after the character escapes notice of the villain.

Final notes

You might have noticed that I’m not really very good at explaining this. It’s just something that you have to see. With that in mind, I recommend that you find a copy of the cartoon short One Froggy Evening. The cartoon was directed by Chuck Jones, and you can find it on Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Two.

This short is a prime example of telling a story without words. There is no dialogue in the cartoon at all, in fact, the only words are in the songs. The story is told almost completely with body language and good editing. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it. Study that short and you’ll soon have a good idea of how to say things without words.

Why should you know how to make these? For one thing, event montage videos are in high demand. This type of video is big business. I know a guy who does wedding videos. He charges significantly more for doing one of these than he does for a video of the complete ceremony.

Second reason. They’re loads of fun to create. When you create a narrative movie, you usually try to stay away from wacky transitions and flashy titles. Doing an event montage gives you a chance to use them and let your wild side come out.

To start making your own event montage, you first need an event. Finding one shouldn’t be too hard. See if you can film a sporting event at your local school, or use a birthday party. Maybe somebody took video of Christmas at your house. If none of those work, just find a couple of friends and a basketball hoop, then film the game.

Now you need some music. If you have Apple’s GarageBand, it’s really easy to make some good music quickly, or just use some of the pre-made songs that come with it. Without GarageBand, you’re on your own. Just make sure that you have the rights to the song that you end up choosing.

Obviously, the first step to editing is to import your footage. Make sure that you’re watching the video as it comes in. You may even want to take notes on parts that you might like to use.

Start the project by laying down an audio track. The next step is up to you. If you have a title in mind, I’d suggest getting that roughed out right away. Often, the style of music and title gives you a feel for the type of video you’ll end up with it. The title that you end up with can be as simple or as complex as you think it needs to be.

When you edit the rest of the video, try to keep these things in mind:

• The video will flow better if you cut to the beat of the music.
• Take advantage of “runs” or drum rolls in the music as quick cut areas.
• Try to show as much of the event as possible.
• Experiment with different effects, like slow motion when someone jumps for a slam dunk.
• Overall, shorter is usually better.

As an exercise, you might also want to try this:

Pick somebody who won’t mind being the subject of a joke, and then find something silly you can do to them in the video. For example, you might choose the coach, and then cut in a shot of him yelling every time you show the other team scoring. Again, make sure that your subject is somebody who won’t mind. This technique can add interest and humor if your video seems a little slow. You probably don’t want to do this to somebody’s wedding video, though.

Once you get the basics, the rest is easy. The possibilities are endless, and most people are wowed by that fact that you made something that looks so professional.

Here’s a little example from our iSundae II work:

Force-Fields

I don’t know what a force-field sounds like. Do you? Since this was a fantasy sound, I went for the fantastic. In order to get just the right sound, I ended up taking a balloon and thwaping it. Then I lowered the pitch a bit, and ended up with a neat “Boiinnng” noise.

Giant Slugs

For this sound I wanted something akin to the caterpillar in A Bug’s Life. The slurpy, bloppy sound that his movement triggers seemed to fit a giant slug. Enter hot water bottle. I filled one about half-full and sloshed it around for awhile, and I’m expecting it to work rather well.

Never Underestimate a Wall

I have to chuckle when I think of all the sound that I’ve created for iSundae II using my hands and my computer desk, chair, or a nearby wall. For when a small character climbed up a chair, I recorded myself drumming my fingers on a wall. Sounds great, and it took me all of thirty seconds to do. If you remember that the object from which you obtain the sound does not have to be the object in the film, you’ll find that you turn to household objects for sound effects more often.

Crazy Things Are Sometimes Necessary

Creating a walking sound for one of our characters had me stumped for awhile. Since he is a stuffed puppet, he never really walked, but instead seemed to shuffle along. Plus, he had to drag a sword sheath, creating more problems. After I tried slapping my hands on a table with poor results, I turned to the crazy. I got a broom, put on a pair of slippers, stood on an office floor mat, and shuffled around while dragging the broom handle. The result not only produced the needed sound, but also made my siblings laugh.

If you’ve tried scrolling credits before, you’ve probably gotten results that look like the letters are dancing quickly back and forth. This is not too hard to fix.

First, let me explain what causes that dancing effect. Video is displayed on your screen by rapidly scanning the video onto the screen. This happens one line at a time. If your moving text has a small area that is only the size of one or two pixels, the scanning causes the small area to seem to dance. There are three things that you can do to improve the quality.

Enlarge the Text

By changing the size of your text, the small areas will be enlarged, creating less room for dancing. This is pretty simple to do. Just make the size of the text bigger.

Choose a Sans-Serif Font

Serifs in fonts are the little fancy bits. Loops, extra lines on the bottom or top, and little swirls are all serifs. I apologize to fancy font fans, but serifs just mean trouble when working with scrolling credits. Picking a sans-serif font (that means without serifs) is easy. Just look for fonts that have “sans-serif” on the end of the font name.

De-Interlace the Clip

Digital video is scanned in parts. To display digital video, the screen scans first either odd or even lines, and then the other half. This speeds up display, but it ruins your credits. This is relatively easy to fix. Just apply a de-interlace filter to the credits.

Now you’re on your way to having beautiful credits. Of course, if you have the time, it’s always good to get fancy with your end credits. Maybe somebody will stay and watch them. Just make sure your audience can still read them!

Things are falling together quite nicely. All of the scenes have been placed together in a rough cut. Although I haven’t found time to watch the whole thing yet, I’m sure that somebody could watch it and understand the story.

Right now, I’m doing sound effects. This has been a fun part for me, because I have to be creative and try to come up with objects that will sound like the props in the film. Yesterday I did a horn sound, using an Australian didjeridoo, played by my younger brother, who plays it much better than I do.

Rebekah and her mom have been recording the musical score for the movie. I heard some of it for the first time yesterday and I was blown away! This is quite a notch up from last year’s score.

My other brother Ben has been creating some great effects. Again, this is a notch up from our previous film.

I hope you’re getting as excited as I am!

To begin with, we shot some nice video of our villain (me!) with some space around him. Here’s a frame from that:

A humble beginning

Next, we broke out the good old blue screen, dressed up five of our seven people to be Norse guards, and shot some video. These are some resulting frames, before keying out the blue screen:

Some guards on blue screen

And a few more

Okay, we’ve got the video that we need. Time to put it together. I launched my favorite video editing software (Final Cut Express) and got to work.

I laid down the villain shot as the background, then added one layer of Norse dudes over the top. A bit of color correction plus some chroma keying, and I had this result:

Where’d those guards come from?!

Not bad, but still a bit unimpressive. Besides, one of those guards looks oddly familiar. Unless she’s got an identical twin serving in this army, I’m not mistaken in thinking that she’s in there twice. Time to cover her up.

I took another clip of blue screen guards (we did three arrangements with each actor switching costumes for each setup), mirrored it to face the other way, and placed that clip on top of the other two. Now we have two rows of guards, no duplicates (except that I’m playing the villain and a guard, but I’ve got a helmet covering my face, so you can’t really tell), and a room full of more people than we had actors. Here’s a frame from the final video:

Final effect

Mission accomplished!

While I’m sitting here, I might as well add an editing update. We’re still slaving away, doing scene after scene. At my last count, we have six more scenes to finish a rough cut on. I could give you a very optimistic date for us to finish a rough cut on the entire film, but I won’t so that we (you and me both) don’t get too disappointed.