If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.

That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.

Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:

There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

There have been a great deal of technical issues preventing me from working as quickly as I’d thought I would be able to. These issues, however, are in no way insurmountable, just really, really annoying. Expect to know more in March, and see the final product in April.

For now, here’s a still image of something or other happening:

Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.

But it’s here now, so…

You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.

This tense situation leaves a burning question in the mind of everyone in the world: what would this situation be like if the disputed Iranian President were a tarantula?

This femto-length film is my attempt to answer that question:

There were lights and crew members in some of the shots, but that’s what CGI is for. There wasn’t nearly as much frenetic camera movement as I wanted, but that could be simulated in post. The problem was that in our rush to get Jesse Pieper’s shots done the first night (he couldn’t make it back the next day), we forgot all of the establishing shots of the thugs.

There is literally zero footage of the thugs not looking in Jarod Bright’s direction. Therefore, there are no shots that would be usable before the Interrogator gets killed. This means the thugs would just appear out of nowhere, as the viewer has no idea that they were in the scen until then. It would effectively push the film beyond “silly” and into the territory of “amateurisih.” As in, it would actually, legitimately suck. But it’s impossible for it to not be terrible, since we don’t have that establishing shot.

Unless I decide to go all non-linear on yo’ ass.

So, that’s what I’ve decided to do. The film will be completed in time for its previously alluded to May 8th upload date. It will start with a shot of the interrogator and end with a shot of Bright watching Clarisse leave. Everything in between will be in a completely different order. And it will be even more ridiciulous than I imagined.

The problem is that I don’t particularly love that idea. It’s not being done because I’m excited about the idea, nor that I think it will work very well, but that it’s pretty much the only way the footage we got would work correctly. Also, the entire cast would hate me forever if I decided not to finish the movie because I didn’t like it. Especially Shannon Mary Burgess, who would probably cut my testicles off with her fingernails.

Well, it’s certainly been a learning experience for me: I am much better at getting what I want from animation than from live action. Working with action-focused videography of live actors is not something I should do when I have to devote half my time to unrelated homework and classes.

Also tapes. I hate tapes, with their dropped frames and broken timecodes and gahhhh. I’m not shooting a scripted production again until I have a memory card video camera.

Of course, had we continued the way I originally planned, it wouldn’t get done because my cast and crew weren’t available for the next 197 hours straight. We did three shots on the film stock and realized that film is infuriating. Fortunately, my director of photography had the foresight to bring her digital camera and shoot those first three shots on DV at the same time. It looked beautiful on the digital display, and the view through the Arri 16mm camera showed that the film might possibly get exposed if we were lucky. So after those first three shots, I came out of my “but I spent money on this film stock”-induced denial and decided we’d go forward on digital.

Oh no, not high definition, how terrible, ewwww. Well, at least it’s a low resolution beautiful image, as opposed to a 1920×1080 pixel image of black.

There were a ridiculous amount of things that made me insane, afraid it wouldn’t get done, afraid I’d smash my head against a wall too many times before it would get done, etc. But we finished the shoot around 10 PM on Sunday. And I think it’s going to be fairly awesome once my head clears enough to import the footage.

Some logistical issues caused two of the thugs to have an abrupt change in casting on the day of the shoot. David Tufano, originally supposed to play Purple Thug, had to cancel on the morning of the 21st because he’d been sick for several days and hadn’t gotten better. Having not known this, I didn’t make any plans for an understudy, but fortunately I had a second David on hand doing production assistance. So with a quick change in character from nerdy thug to burly manly thug, the wonderful David Lanz fit nicely into the role. He was quite knowledgable at how to cough and twitch on the floor as he died, being a forensic science student and all. The second change occurred because Blade Rogers had to go before we ended up taking a single shot of Orange Thug, so I swapped in Dan Clifford, another production assistant. Blade did help a tremendous amount with lighting before he had to disappear, though.

Oh, and one of the plugs for a light socket exploded. Nobody was hurt, but it did mean we had to finish the majority of the film with only two black lights. A third would have been nice for some shots, but we managed.

But now that all this has happened, I have two personal goals: Get a Red camera, and never shoot on film again. We had lights configured so that my eyes were in pain looking at the bright glow in front of me, and the light meter wasn’t even moving. What an incredible waste of my time and money that attempt at film was.

On a more positive note, I have now completely come to terms with the fact that good filmmaking cannot be done by one person. That may seem obvious, as someone has to act in front of the camera, of course, but what I really mean is that if it weren’t for my DP, Claire Ensslin, and my sound guy Gregory Wells, this entire shoot would have fallen apart.

Oh, yeah, and the cast. Them too. I love you all.

Will Rosenberg, who played the Interrogator, set up a YouTube channel exclusively for Bright Black. At first I thought that was a bit redundant, but it’s probably best not to clog my Plankhead account with a ton of different videos; he already uploaded some of the B-roll he took with his pocket camera thing. I leave you with a short clip of our celebratory last shot: Clarisse smashing the bottle on Orange Thug’s head.

For a larger display size, see the film’s official page.

I don’t have much to say about this, as I feel it speaks for itself. I should mention, though, that once I figured out the best workflow, this film took an average of under one hour of work per second of finished animation. It’s 268 seconds, and I completed all the art, animation, and sound editing in less than a week. Granted, about 36 hours of that work happened consecutively; I totally would have done stuff like eat and go to sleep if it wasn’t due at 6 PM yesterday (it was a project for my Editing class). Nonetheless, a 3600:1 ratio of work vs. finished footage is, I’m willing to bet, significantly lower than mainstream hyper-expensive Hollywood productions, and would probably be feasible for a high quality film if only I was working with someone who was good at drawing. I’m not implying that I created a Pixar-quality film, but it’s technically on par with Dragon Ball Z, if not artistically.

Also, Kyle Gabler is awesome for letting me use his music in this. He originally composed the three songs spliced into this for World of Goo, which is way up there with Grim Fandango and Portal on my short list of Games You Should Play Before You Die But Preferably Right Now. So after watching this movie, go get World of Goo. Here are fifteen links to the exact same page at which you can do this.