The Fourth Child

The Thunderbird 6 series started as a joke between friends. Then morphed into an vertical episodic using phone and osmo footage to fuel my “wrestling style fake feud” with Brandon. 

Then I bought the RED camera and we stepped up our game “for one,” we said. “Just one.” That one reinvigorated my love for story telling and filmmaking so from there we decided to make the Mehico Cinemo Saga an exercise of the demons within me to make my film. We needed to make sure every episode needs to have a unique technique we work with to make the exercise worth venturing off the daily routine for. 

I could be spending the time I work on this, planning the feature film or building a new reel or working on building business, but honestly, this is such good therapy for me. Not to mention it is great practice. There is 2 to 3 of us tops and 2 of those people are both me most of the time. It is the hardest conditions and scenarios you can have when trying to make pictures.

The silver lining, as we begin to raise money for the film, I have these small episodes that will clearly show my expertise and skill. 

I said, I would go to Episode 20 and then I’d step down and start really working on the larger  more serious projects. 

Then Episode 13 came, and changed everything I loved about the process. It was like considering a fourth kid until the third child learns to walk and move and suddenly a vasectomy feels like the better choice.

The script was a simple story beat: Garrick and the gang discuss the value of the Clown while being humbled by the fact that nobody wants to do business with them. 

The original script was going to be just Mehico and Garrick. I was going to put them on green screen real simple like, behind a desk and time out a quick conversation. 

Then I thought, well how cool would it be to use all three characters? It took 3 reshoots to even get it close to complete. I broke the 50 hour mark on the edit. It was way more than I had ever planned on putting into any of these. 

On top of compositing the green screen footage, I also had to time out each characters dialogue to give my self time for the other characters to talk. 

I had grown so frustrated trying to get it right I decided to go back and shoot close ups just so I had something to cut away to and finish the episode. When it comes down to it, I wasn’t prepared to shoot MYSELF on green screen as three different characters and have it play out perfectly, so I began reshooting until I got it to the point I was happy with it. Because the video is compiled of 3 different shoots of the 3 different characters using 3 different camera man, the exposure, color and angles were all different which meant there was no automating some of the work. It was compositing for EACH individual clip AND HOLY S*** it was a lot of clips. 

Lesson learned. Bring on the next Marvel Movie. 

I cut about 1 minute of dialogue to shorten it, but honestly it may have subconsciously been just so I didn’t have to do that extra work. 

Here are the before (RAW) shots of some the latest episode of the Thunderbird 6: