Behind the Bananas

Kong III Overlooking a Valley in Washington

Finished Composite After Rotoscoping

Keying

All of the shooting for the short is completed and turned out very well. We are now in the process of "keying" all of the footage and compositing it together. Keying is taking footage and removing a color, usually blue or green, so that you can change the background or what ever you are "keying" out. In this case it is the blue background that we want to remove and replace it with many different scenes of Kong in his natural surrounding. It is a very time consuming process to get a good key. The tricky part about keying a monkey is all of the hairs are mixed with blue on them and if you aren't careful, your monkey ends up with no hair. ... So we want to be careful.

Extending Screen with Green Poster board.

Seattle Shooting Begins

Setting up the Lights to get the best blue screen.

Questions Comments?

If you have any questions or want us to talk about a certain aspect of our film, just click on the comments. You can also e-mail us at b40f@hotmail.com

Production Day 8

Production has been slow but steady over the past few days. Dave is spending time up in Tonasket helping Grandpa on the ranch. He was putting in new irrigation pipes for a pasture that Grandpa is preparing.

Meanwhile I am back in Spokane doing several production processes. One very important, but also very boring job is transcribing. I took our 40 minute interview with Kong III and typed up every word. It is actually a very necessary task. It helps to have the written interview when we are trying to storyboard for the shots we need. Usually we would be using the script as material to draw story boards from, but as the interview is a major part of our script, it needed to be typed.

I have also been looking at behind the scenes footage that I will be needing to use for Kong III. Each shot that we place Kong III in will take hours of work and they need to be planned very carefully. We need to make sure we know what angles to place the cameras on the blue screen set so that they will match the behind the scenes footage that Kong will be placed into. All very fun, but time consuming.

Production Day 5

Time is ticking and some things have happened in the last two days. We made a quick stop in Omak on our way up north to see our Cousin Derek and watch Star Wars III. It sure is nice to have closer on the Star Wars movies. It really cleared up some things and answered several questions I had about the Old Star Wars. It is a little darker than most of the other films, but that is to be expected since Anakin turns into Darth Vader.

One of the DAT recorders was giving us problems and not powering up for us. Dave took it apart and trouble shot it for us. It turns out that a wire in the power supply was busted. Oh, good. That's a piece of cake to fix. :) I brought my soldering kit and re-soldered the wire and it has been working just fine ever since.

We set up a recording studio in a bed room at Uncle's house and began our interview with "The Kong." What a blast. Dave was the "interviewer" and was asking Kong questions related to family expectations for Kong, along with normal actor questions. Uncle really got into character and we were able to get a really good interview. Uncle really made the interview. He can just come up with stuff that sounds funny, with out even trying.

After a good recording session we moved outside for a 5 hole round of golf in on lawn and a BBQ at the fire pit. The weather was fantastic, with a bright sunny day and a blue sky. God sure spent some extra effort to make the that part of Washington beautiful.

The next order of business is to make a shooting script for the blue screen Kong shoot.