Making "AlBot" Pt. 3 - Preproduction

If there's one thing I learned over the years of filming stuff, it's that you can't trust your brain to remember anything on the shoot day. You're going to miss things. Worse, you're going to think of things you need on the spot and regret not getting them in advance.

Even for a tiny scene like this, there are a bunch of elements to consider. For example, it starts with CD hammering. I have a hammer. But really whaling on something right by the lens while trying to deliver lines is impractical, both for safety and for recording clean audio. Miming the hammering with a real tool will look obvious. So I need a realistic, light prop hammer.

Same with the giant wrench. Those things are heavy. Maneuvering and dropping it as depicted in the animatic would be hard. A prop would make life easier.

At the end there's the obvious "where we're going" BTTF reference and I think it would be funny and absurd for CD to suddenly have a visor to flip down in that shot. I don't want to use a literal replica of Doc's visor, so I'll find some sort of goofy '80s shades.

A quick Amazon shopping spree later, here are the final props:

Experimenting early with the robot's look in Blender I realized that it would probably help to have mockups of the strangling arms on set to maybe cast shadows on CD and help with camera tracking.

I rendered a side view of the arm, printed it out across multiple sheets in true scale and used that as a stencil to cut foam board.

Mounting the cutouts on a couple of light stands should work well.

Speaking of lighting... I'm shooting on greenscreen but trying to depict a realistic environment. I can't just point some LED panels at my head and call it a day. The lighting needs to look motivated and change depending on the angle or characters' position.

I don't want to flesh out all the details of the environment in advance. It's not that important for the scene - just a murky, messy scifi cargo bay. For now I'll simply decide on a basic, abstract arrangement of light sources and stay mindful of how they would rotate from shot to shot.

There'll be a bluish backlight to screen right of Alan (which will intensify once he walks over to the table, and a warm backlight to screen right of CD & the robot. These lights will also leak as fill onto the opposite character's side, hopefully creating a cohesive feeling.

Since the greenscreen doesn't move, the lights will have to. Via my muscles. Rearranging them as few times as possible is a priority for shooting order. There's also the issue of makeup. I'll of course need to film all of one character's side, then the other.

For many years I've been using an excellent iOS app called Shot Lister. It lets you import a script, create a shot list and plan an extremely detailed, realistic shooting schedule, which can then be tracked throughout the shoot day and dynamically updated on-the-fly.

After inputting all the variables and really thinking through the logistics, it seems if I start filming this 1-minute video at 10 AM, I'll be able to finish by 8 PM.

What am I doing with my life? Don't think about it. The shoot is next!