Farewell Friend! from
Bartlett Productions on
Vimeo.
This video was created in honor of a good friend Caleb Kenney who was leaving for ALERT (Air Land Emergency Resource Team).
http://www.AlertAcademy.com
On the 29
th of December, Hannah Kenney sent us an email and asked if we could make a short video for Caleb Kenney's Surprise going away party on the 31
st.
Caleb was leaving on the 16
th of January for
ALERT, and would be gone for quite some time. He has been a good friend of ours since before I was born, so we where glad to do something for him. (Caleb was also the lead actor in
Excelsior)
I didn't have much chance to think about it until the 30th because I was busy working on the Bartlett Farm Pork Commercial, but that afternoon (of the 30th) I drew up a bit of a storyboard and Jonathan wrote up what to say.
 |
| The very rough storyboard. |
Jonathan David and I then went out and grabbed the jib, filmed Jonathan's lines, set up the tripod and shot David's, and then for mine, Jonathan held the tripod and walked in a half circle around me as I said my lines. I afterward stabilized it in After Effects. Peter was working at Metigoshe Ministries vacuuming, so we weren't able to film his lines, then. I downloaded the footage we had that night, and I can't remember if I did some editing then or not.
The next morning, (the 31
st) I edited/color corrected the footage and worked on animating the end title. I tried to do it in 2.5D, but I'd never done it before so it doesn’t look quite right. Hannah had sent me the picture of Caleb on the 30
th and I erased around it and came up with the concept for the animation that night also.
 |
| A screenshot from After Effects. |
The problem was the video wasn't very exciting with people just talking, so we decided it needed an action sequence as an intro. At about 4:00 PM, (Peter was busy until then) Jonathan, Peter and I got things ready and talked about what we should do for the fight scene. I wanted some chase type scenes, Peter wanted something with switching mags, etc, etc, so we put it all together and it turned out pretty good. We then headed out, filmed the “Excelsior!” scene and Peter's line and then filmed the fight scene. It was getting rather dark but I was able to lighten it up some in post. We got done with filming at about 5:00 PM, right when Peter had to go get ready to milk. The message “Change Battery Pack” came up right after I shot the last clip.
“The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.” - Proverbs 16:33
Okay, we had all the footage, the animation done, and some of the editing/color correction done, but here it is 5:15 PM and Kenneys where hoping to have it by 6-6:30. The race was on!
I dove into it and worked as fast as I could go, multitasking whenever possible. (For instance stabilizing shots in After Effects while I was editing.) I had to edit the whole fight scene, add in two more clips into the interview part, do color correction, add a vignette and music.
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| Editing the fight scene. |
 |
| Stabilizing a shot in After Effects. |
After I finished editing the fight scene and the other clips I did an overall CC to make it lighter and higher contrast. I then had to find some music. For the fight scene, I used the
Excelsior fight music and for the animation clip I used some from the Excelsior credits. The piano music came with Adobe Premiere Elements.
After that was done, I rendered it out which took about 30 minutes and then uploaded to Vimeo which took around 30 minutes. I got it to them somewhere around 8:15 PM. A little late, but it still worked out. I have to admit, I was shaking by the time I was done! (probably partly due to the freezing cold office) We all had a good time doing it though and we're glad that we where able to bless Caleb with it.
In Christ,
Andrew Bartlett
