Written and Directed by Stefan Koski
Starring (in order of appearance) Lucas Clunan, Michael Schenkel
Length:8 minutes, 59 seconds
Click to watch it on Google Video Synopsis and Director's Notes Bob and Fitz detail the devestating effects of abort- uhh, I mean, overpopulation on the land in the last 200 years. The catch? Bob looks like Mr. Rogers and Fitz... well, Fitz you'll just have to see for yourself.
This was originally an environmental science project for Luke. It was supposed to be fairly simple in design, but then Mike showed up and you just can't keep anything simplistic (or factual) with Mike around.
The scenes interjected here and there as introduced by Fitz and in the dramatization were the first scenes we shot for the night. Luke has a coffee table in his living room that you can lift the glass up and there's a zen garden type deal inside, complete with sand, seashells, and small pieces of drift wood. Luke then brought down a large tub of old action figures that we shifted through to find the most "people" type characters to use for the film. The lion and baboon are Scar and Rafiki (respectively) from The Lion King. We then pushed everything to one side so we could add materials for the second dramatization. Both are done by adding materials in-between cuts, breaking each clip down to several seconds, and then playing them back-to-back.
Luke purposely mispronounces three words throughout the program: analyst, dramatization, and program (as analyst, dramatitzation, and pogram). That last one is probably offensive to some people, but you'd be hard pressed to find something about our work that isn't.
Officially I didn't write the script for this video (there was no script to begin with), but there are a lot of odds and ends that I'll take credit for. The Star Jones jokes in the blooper reel, the tangent Luke goes on about paying attention to your daughter (all things considered, I'm the only one out of the three of us that actually has a daughter), and the question I originally posed as, "What kind of plant is in your hat there, Fitz?" which we later recorded Luke as asking.
But a lot more credit goes to Mike--who has way more creative energy than he would ever know what to do with. He personally picked out each article of clothing for the outfit he's wearing, right down to the leaf that he cut from a potted plant in the kitchen. We were filming outside because we figured it was about as exotic of a location as we could get. The idea was that he was in the depths of Africa but, clearly, he's surrounded by snow. Mount Kilimanjaro, we suppose. The name "Fitz" was a name that we came up with at random ("Fitz" rhymes with "Ritz" crackers, the wrapper of which falls as the last piece of pollution in the dramatization), and Jemima is even more random (Mike's idea, naturally). As a side note, this particular scene was very well lighted because Luke held the exact same lamp that's to his left in the opening and ending scenes just out of frame.
The real question is, "What's the deal with the banana?" Honestly, I don't know. There were a bunch of bananas sitting in a fruit bowl in the kitchen, and somehow they worked their way into the video. Luke never understood the purpose of them, and to be fair, Mike and I didn't know either. Didn't bother us of course. The idea to wipe the banana with the sponge was mine, but the idea to lower the sponge from a poll (it's attached to the end of a broom stick with Scotch tape) was Mike's. Still, one of my favorite parts of the bloopers is watching Luke ask us, "Why do I need a banana for the last time?" only to have me tell him, "Because there's a banana in every single shot and I'll be damned if we leave out of this last one!"
Mike absurdly backs me up on this with, "Good point, good point Stefan."
Overall I had a lot of fun making this video. I worked with a great cast (and nothing's funnier than watching a calm and straight-faced character that Luke plays contrasted with the characters that Mike plays, which are nothing short of bouncing off the walls). The shoot ran a little longer than I expected (4 hours) but it was time well spent.
An odd thing about every video I make for other people's class projects (and these days they're rarely for my own grades) is that, inevitably, someone mentions that either the teacher will laugh hysterically through the whole thing or they'll be so offended that they'll just turn off the TV after the first two minutes. Well, I'll proudly note that with the addition of this one I am eight-for-eight when it comes to making videos that have the teacher laughing hysterically through every last second. Admittedly though, Luke's environmental science teacher did inquire afterwards as to what drug Mike was on during the shoot.
I know better than anyone that Mike's eclectic talent is all natural.
Music in this Film: Low Rider--War
Piano Sonata 14, "Moonlight"--Beethoven
