The floor on the sides of the auditorium slants upwards towards the “cheap seats”. One side had a flat platform, but I assumed that Daniel would be on the other side (Murphy’s Law). I set up on the slant, but I had a bubble level attached to the tripod to make sure the camera was on an even keel.
Dave put on his Spectreman bag and Todd was dressed as the Transvestite Scuba Diving Monster from Hell. We staged a big fight in their backyard – it should have been funny. It was, we ran into a problem that would plague us throughout the course of Spectreman. With the bag on his head, Dave couldn’t see a thing.
Our Spectreman philosophy was born. With the production limitations, it would be next to impossible to create believable special effects, so we decided to create unbelievable special effects. The Avon boxes became the city. An old black chair became the attacking airplane. We were set except for a main character. Dave thought of Spectreman, so he got to be the hero.
I was one of two crewmembers running the technical aspects. We’d switch off every episode. One week I’d run the switcher and the audio board, the next I would run both cameras. It was a typical local access show: the set consisted of two chairs and a plant.
After working about twenty or thirty hours on this project, I empathize with those archivists who struggle to restore classic films to their original state. It makes me appreciate the work that went into Lawrence of Arabia and silent classics like Metropolis though – by definition – their work should be unnoticeable if it’s done well. If I manage to reconstruct this program and get it edited the way I feel it should be done, most likely the audience will never know (unless they read this blog).
Last Sunday, Daniel and I carved the Jack O’Lantern. Here’s a link to the video.
The time is ten o’clock, the place: a bank in Schaumburg. Three mysterious figures are seen fleeing the area. The next morning, officials are horrified to discover the bank has been robbed. The crooks were very smart; they didn’t trip off any alarms. However, they were also pretty dumb. They stole sixty dollars in pennies.
Flag football kicks off the 2008 season this weekend, weather permitting. I’ve already been out to Daniel’s practices, camcorder at the ready. With a little practice and a little patience, football actually lends itself to being shot by a single camera unlike – say, basketball, where you need at least two cameras (three is better) to reasonably capture all the action. Football games also lend themselves being shot as narrative.
I came up with this swashbuckling hero in the spirit of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Ray and his sidekick zoomed around the galaxy in the atomic rocket X-1 (like, what else do you name an atomic rocket?), looking for adventure.
Well, to be technical, he would have zoomed around the galaxy looking for adventure, but the comic turned out to be rather short-lived. And when I say short-lived, I mean one page.
We finished up around 11:00 on September 23, 1981. My dad had been liberally lubricating some of the parents and we had a pretty lively premiere of “To the Moon” in my family room. I can remember being pretty impressed by our final product – we were on TV!
