Linguini Productions presents... "Super"-Hero!

 Welcome back bloggers! The coveted day is FINALLY here. Our FINALIZED version of our film opener, "Super"-Hero, is AVAILABLE NOW!!!

"Super"-Hero:

Synopsis

It's a bright sunny day in a seemingly uneventful neighborhood. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, cars are sitting still in driveways. But, all is not as peaceful as it seems. A band of EVIL robbers spring up and prepare to launch a great heist upon these innocent homes. They move quickly and quietly, taking whatever they want and taking care of anyone who gets in their way. Who ever will save this poor neighborhood from these greedy freaks? Against odds like these, only one man can save the day: A powerful man!

Credits

This film was directed by none other than our great savior himself: Yulian Vargas! He was the front-man in all the filming, all the creative design, and ESPECIALLY as our main star! Additionally, I myself was the executive producer. I was in charge of securing props, actors, crew, and keeping the project on schedule and within the 2-minute time frame. Next up, my friend Pablo Mendez was the lead editor and composer for the film, being in charge of making our film look as pretty as possible! Our main cast, of course, featured myself, Pablo Mendez, Yulian Vargas, Pedro Rodriguez, and our special guest appearance: Sebastian Rodriguez! Sebastian may have only been a guest appearance, but his presence certainly made our film special!

What if we didn't choose to film "Super"-Hero?

Welcome back bloggers! Today, we will be exploring an interesting hypothetical: What if we chose another brainstorming idea instead of "Super"-Hero? 

Concept 1: Manuel y Linguini

Looking back, this idea was OBJECTIVELY our worst one at the time. However, it also would have been a bit easier to film. All we'd really need is Mario and Luigi costumes and the rest could simply be acted out! However, that's really where the benefits for having picked this option end. The concept of showing a childhood flashback and then a confrontation scene would have required too much time to actually work properly, and would have worked better as a short film. Additionally, finding an actor to play their mother would have been RIDICULOUSLY hard. We'd need to find an older woman, and picking any actor that differed in age from us would be neigh impossible. For the same reason, the childhood flashback would have been difficult to film since we'd need the help of children, who may be difficult to get to act properly.

Concept 3: Something in the Forest?

Something in the Forest? was actually our original plan for the final project, and although it would've turned out cool, this was impossible to film for a few reasons. Firstly, we'd have needed to film outdoors for EVERY scene. Secondly, this outdoor filming would have to occur at night for EVERY scene. These 2 factors alone made the film impossible to create since filming in the woods at night is not only something NOBODY wanted to do, but also because it's a stupid idea that could potentially be dangerous. Propping and costumes for this film would have been on the lower side, seeing as we'd only have needed basically a flashlight and some old clothes, but that's where the benefits end. Lighting would have been too dark, filming would be impossible, and the film itself would have been quite boring. So, with all that in mind, "Super"-Hero was our BEST idea yet by FAR!

What was our inspiration for "Super"-Hero?

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking about our inspiration for "Super"-Hero, and I don't just mean the plot. As we approach the date where our final product will be shown to the world, I thought it'd be fitting to go right back to the start, and talk about everything that inspired us along the way!

Beloved childhood shows!

Obviously, since our film mainly appeals to younger audiences, we used shows from our childhood for inspiration! Looking back, one of the biggest influences on our film was Teen Titans Go! from Cartoon Network. After all, Robin was our main inspiration for Power-Man's costume in the early days, and we even planned to match his color scheme!  This show specifically had a great blend of action and brain-rotting comedy that was sure to make any parent want to rip out their hair after listening to it for 2 hours. However, we couldn't just slap a thousand fart jokes in our opener and call it a day, so we had to branch off from comedic influence. As far as Power-Man's actual mannerisms went, Paul Blart was a GREAT influence on how our not-so-super hero could behave. Paul Blart as a character is meant to be goofy while placed in a serious-looking role, so he was the PERFECT character to model Power-Man off of!

Marvel Studios!

Obviously, you can't make a superhero-themed piece of media in the 21st century without taking SOME inspiration from Marvel Comics or Marvel Studios. After all, Marvel content made up probably 90% of our mood board for our project! Although Power-Man is definitely more aligned with DC heroes than Marvel, we took a lot of inspiration from the latter as superhero comedies is what they're all about! Movies like Ant-Man: Quantumania, Thor: Ragnarok, and the old Spider-Man films all served as great inspiration for how we wanted not only Power-Man to look like, but also the robbers! The Ant-Man films in particular were great for this since Scott Lang used to steal for a living, so all we had to do was adapt that heist-esque character for our robbers and put our own goofy twist on how we acted. Additionally, Marvel served as a great example of what NOT to do when making our opening as comedic as possible. Since recently Marvel has developed a reputation for forcing comedy into every scene imaginable, we decided it'd be best to go for a balance of action and silliness so that our film wouldn't feel like another Phase 5 box office flop!

My experience playing a robber in "Super"-Hero!

Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be discussing my acting role in our film, "Super"-Hero, that being of course one of the robbers! 

    

Robbers from left to right: Pablo, Myself, Pedro

Getting accustomed to the role!

Getting into the mindset of a robber straight out of a cartoon was BY NO MEANS the easiest thing in the world. I remember on our first day of filming I kept trying out different accents, mannerisms, and different ways I could add to the character. Particularly, on the first day of filming I got carried away with doing a Russian accent for the robber, but we didn't film nearly enough for the accent to make much of a difference. Then, after renovating our entire game plan, I had the opportunity to try something different with my character during the Power-Man confrontation. I decided I'd go for a sarcastic and somewhat cocky personality since I thought it would blend well with Power-Man's own extravagance. In theory AND in practice, this ended up working super well for the confrontation, since it allowed us to highlight Power-Man's own over-the-top mannerisms in contrast to the seemingly normal robbers. All in all, I'm SUPER happy with how both my character and the rest of the cast turned out to be in the film! 

What I learned!

Before getting into this project, even before we had settled on "Super"-Hero as an idea, I knew I wanted to play some sort of antagonist. I thought playing a bad guy would be second nature for me specifically because of my own personality and voice, and to an extent I was right! I didn't necessarily have any issues acting my parts out, except for the scene where we first saw Power-Man but that was because being mentally prepared for Pedro screaming "MAN WHO IS THAT?" right behind me came with its own set of challenges. If there was one main lesson I learned from my experience in playing this robber, it's that physically acting is not as easy as some people make it seem. Acting is not just putting on a cool voice and moving around, and it encompasses COUNTLESS smaller details. Sometimes you need certain small head tilts, or wait a few milliseconds before moving a single limb, and especially you need to literally BECOME the character you play. These were all things that I tried my best to tackle head-on, especially since it was my robber character who would confront Power-Man, but with limited time and a fairly exhausted crew I had to go with what I knew for certain I could pull off and not experiment too much. What I do know is that if we had as many filming days as we wanted with infinite energy, I would probably have played a VERY different character than the one I played on-screen, but for what we had, I turned out pretty good!

Superhero Comedies 101!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking about "Super"-Hero and our attempts to fit our desired genre of a superhero comedy, including what we did right and what we had to change on set!

Making our film "funny"!

For how much we talked about making our film a generic superhero comedy, we did a SURPRISINGLY bad job at making the film funny in any sort of way during the first storyboard and film phase! During storyboarding, our assumption was sort of that we'd just make up the comedy along the way during the events of the film. There were barely any moments where we purposefully wrote scenes out to have comedic effect. On the 3rd and 4th film days, however, we remembered what genre our film was and we began ACTING accordingly (ba-dum tsss)! In all seriousness, we came up with some great ideas after we scrapped the robbery scene, such as having a crowbar be able to speak and having the Hooded Robber tell the Homeowner to go back to sleep as if his home wasn't being ransacked! The best comedic scene, in my personal opinion, was Power-Man getting knocked out by the Beanie Robber! This scene used to look stale, but after we made some tweaks, such as Power-Man doing a wind-up punch only to start flapping his arms and editing a BONK sound once he got whacked, it became an absolute gem among our film. Pablo really knows his thing when it comes to sound effects!

What else could we have done?

In all honesty, what we did in the film was kind of the limit on comedy that we could put in. We didn't want the film to be so ridiculous that the plot loses all meaning, but also not be so serious to where it just becomes boring. Additionally, being limited to 2 minutes meant there wasn't a whole lot of wiggle room if we wanted to keep a balance of comedy and action in our opening. Now, if we were able to go up to 5 minutes for the opening, things would have been different. We'd probably be able to fit the robbery scene that we cut, and there's PLENTY of comedic potential in that scene alone. Some ideas we had for that scene were: the Alien robber forgetting his money bag, the Alien robber having a strange obsession with stealing belts, and the robbers all getting flung into the air when Power-Man landed! If making a crowbar talk and having Sebastian make loud snoring noises produced comedic effect, then more time to implement those ideas would have made our opening thrice as funny as it is now!

The simplicity behind filming "Super"-Hero!

 Welcome back, bloggers! In today's post, I will be addressing an interesting choice we made during the filming of "Super"-Hero: Why did we not choose to rent special camera equipment? 

Why did we choose not to do it?

The short answer is we didn't think we'd need it. In our group, Yulian and Pablo already had prior experience filming on mobile phone, and all of our phones had decent quality cameras. This plus the fact that one of us had tripods at home further convinced us that we wouldn't need to rent out special equipment. It's not like renting out special equipment was an impossible feat either. Prior to filming, a media team had come to our school and offered their services for rental in case we wanted some more premium filming capabilities. They had cameras, microphones, and even lights! However, at the end of the day, we felt that we could produce a perfectly good film opener without such special equipment, and not doing so also gave us flexibility with scheduling film dates!

Did we ever regret not renting special equipment?

On the third day of filming, there came a time where shaky filming became an issue, particularly for when we were filming the robbers breaking into the house initially. This was one of the only times where we felt that having special camera equipment would have benefitted us, and even then we were able to persevere with a little bit of practice! Overall, we never regretted our choice to not rent out special equipment simply because we didn't need it. Our main priorities were finishing the film on time while getting the best possible shots we could get, and finding fancy equipment would've just cost us time and money. Would our film have looked better if we used said special equipment? Absolutely, but just with a couple of mobile phones and a small tripod we were able to produce some absolutely stellar footage. Another factor is that we already knew how to film with phones for the most part. If we got special equipment, we'd need to spend time learning how to use said equipment, and as you've seen in all of my filming day blogs, time was the ONE thing we NEVER had enough of!

FINAL DAY OF FILMING!!!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking about our fourth and final day of filming for our movie opener, "Super"-Hero! With the conclusion of our fourth day, which took place on February 2nd, we were FINALLY able to finish ALL filming for the movie, and this was without a doubt our STRONGEST day yet!

Shhh... You'll wake him up!

Now wait a second...

Insert witty caption here

UNEXPECTED ROADBLOCK!

Going into the 4th filming day, we encountered an unexpected roadblock: After editing, our film was already pushing a minute long. Specifically, the robbery scene would have taken up at least 20 seconds of filming time, leaving us with nothing for Power-Man's scene and defeating the purpose of the character as a whole. With that in mind, we had to think of a new scene to put in place of the robbery AND film it within the same day! Luckily for us, our idea to make the Homeowner be asleep from the third day of filming gave us a GENIUS idea: Replace one old idea with another! Essentially, we were going to take our idea of knocking out the Homeowner, give it a facelift, and slap it in the place of the robbery! We did this by making 2 of the robbers discover the Homeowner sleeping, then having the robbers prepare to knock out the Homeowner, and finally Power-Man SWOOPING IN in the background. Major problem solved all within 3 hours. With 2 hours left, it was time to film the Power-Man confrontation, and boy was this harder than we ever thought possible...

FINISHING what we started!

Power-Man's confrontation was by far the hardest scene we filmed in the entire opening. This was because making a fake fight scene turned out to not be as simple as Power-Man missing a punch and a robber bonking him on the head! This single scene took FOREVER, since the action itself was always awkward in all the smallest ways to the point where at least one of us would have an issue with how the scene turned out. We tried several different ideas: Having Power-Man do a wind up punch and then getting bonked, different dialogue options, using a bat to knock him out instead of a hammer, using a CROWBAR to knock him out instead of a hammer, having Power-Man stumble over and fall without a single punch being thrown! Eventually, we settled on Power-Man beginning to throw a punch, but then start rapidly flapping his arms at the robber, leaving him in confusion. After that, the robber would simply bonk Power-Man once on the head with the hammer and he'd fall to the ground in defeat, with the robber still confused. This idea still took a solid 20 minutes to film properly, but in the end we FINALLY finished that scene, and since we filmed the robbers running out early, it meant that, after 4 days, we FINALLY FINISHED ALL FILMING FOR "Super"-Hero!!!

THIRD Day of Filming!!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking all about our third day of filming for "Super"-Hero! This filming day, which took place on February 1st, was EXPONENTIALLY better than our first two, and this marked the beginning of a new leaf for us!

We've got... visitors?

He's got NO idea what's coming!

A prime target...

Moving forward from a DISASTROUS Day 2!

Going into the third day of filming, the atmosphere was certainly a lot different than it was the first day. After mediocre filming on the first day and purely abysmal takes from the second day, the entire team was DETERMINED to make the third day count. We knew we wanted the film to be done by the end of the weekend, and we were going to accomplish that goal at ALL costs. We had reviewed the storyboard and went right back to square one. We reshot the ENTIRE opening scene that we filmed on the first day, trying out new camera angles, new ideas, but most importantly we were making sure each shot was FINAL PRODUCT material. One thing we were able to begin working towards on this day that we failed to do the first day was that we began working towards fleshing out the comedy aspect of our film, instead of just making it act out like a generic robbery. In this, we did quite well, reutilizing the Homeowner to be a disruption in the tense mood evoked in the first few seconds of the film rather than getting knocked on the head and then completely forgotten about for the rest of the film. 

Our mortal enemy... Exhaustion.

Even though things had been going well for the first few hours, we ran into a HUGE roadblock when it came time to film the robbery scene. This roadblock, of course, was our total and complete exhaustion with filming multiple retakes of second-long scenes for hours on end. We began ignoring the initial storyboard and started experimenting with new ideas, a staggering NONE of which we decided to use. Additionally, the sun was beginning to set and it would have been awkward with the rest of our footage. With that in mind, we called it a day at 5pm with roughly 40% of the film being final product material. Originally we wanted to aim for finishing the ENTIRE film on Saturday and then doing reshoots Sunday, but this would've required us to either have started filming several hours earlier instead of the afternoon or get every single take perfect on the first try, neither of which were feasible for us. That night, we knew this film needed to be editing-ready by the end of Sunday, and also that we were on a much stricter time limit than we thought. In order to make Sunday our final filming day, we'd need to get every scene shot PERFECTLY within 5 hours before the sun began setting, and to push through our reshoot fatigue as best as we could, and in my next post, you'll see how we did exactly that.

What if "Super"-Hero were a multimillion dollar production?

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be creating a scenario for you: Imagine "Super"-Hero was created by a filming industry giant, such as Disney or Paramount! What would change from what we did in our actual film if we had access to a supreme bank of money and resources? Would parts of our film change at ALL if we had access to such a piggy bank, and if so, how?

Actors   

    For starters, in my opinion at least, Power-Man should be played by none other than Kevin James himself! This man is a comedy legend, and I think he'd play Power-Man perfectly specifically for his performance in Paul Blart: Mall Cop! A fat, goofy cop turned goodie two-shoes "superhero" would be PERFECT for the tone we were looking to strike for this film. As for the Homeowner, due to his limited role, we don't need anyone particularly special. If we wanted to have him come back again during the film, perhaps I'd choose someone like John C. Reilly to play him. No particular reason for this choice aside from the fact that our actual Homeowner actor, Sebastian, has some resemblance to Reilly. As for the robbers, this choice is kind of hard since the way we acted in the opening was different from any actor I could think of. Liam Neeson is an obvious choice, since he is the definitive bad guy, but for the Hooded and Alien robbers things get a little complicated. For the Hooded Robber, I would probably choose Rob Delaney purely because he looks similar to Pablo, our actual actor for the Hooded Robber. As for the Alien Robber, I would keep the actor we have now (Pedro) simply because the flair he brings to the character is unmatched.

Filming equipment, special effects, etc.

As far as lighting, props, costumes and other things go for our film, I honestly wouldn't change much! Power-Man's costume would definitely get an upgrade to something a bit less handmade, but other than that the way we filmed all the scenes was solid for how we wanted the film to turn out! The only thing I'd really change with cameras is getting tripods or stabilizers so that shaky footage doesn't become an issue for us during editing. Speaking of editing, some sort of technology that keeps the house appearing as if though it were always day time would be nice considering how easily we run out of filming time. The one thing I'd say I wish WE had is extra time to film and edit. We had so many ideas for how we wanted the film to turn out and equally many of those ideas never came to fruition simply because of time limits and constraints. If we had maybe 5 minutes of film time and 1-2 months of straight filming, we could probably have produced a short film worthy of an OSCAR with the amount of quality we'd have put into the final product. For what we had and worked with, though, our film turned out pretty fantastic!

Analyzing some of "Super"-Hero's camera shots and angles!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be going into some camera shots and angles that we used for our film opening, "Super"-Hero, as well as how they fit in, why we chose them, and some ideas we tried that didn't work out!

Low Angle

Canted Angle

Full Shot

Medium Shot

High Angle

How was acquiring these shots and angles?

Since we ruled out acquiring any special camera equipment, all of these shots and angles had to be done with our phones, a small tripod, and our hopes and dreams. Luckily though, we are resourceful, so we were able to get some harder shots by using what we already had on set. Of these 5 sample shots, the hardest one to capture was by far the canted angle for the scene of the robbers leaving the Homeowner's room. This is because we didn't have a lot of experience with holding cameras steady and producing as little shake as possible, so it took us a couple of practice shots before we finally got it right! We captured the high angle shot by grabbing a nearby stool, and the low angle was achieved by setting the phone face-first on the Homeowner's belly so the camera got a close-up of the Hooded Robber and Alien Robber. As for why we chose to use these shots, it all comes down to what we want to be conveyed in the situation: A high angle at the beginning shows the disorganization of the robbers and them scrambling to get in the house, a low angle makes the Homeowner look totally vulnerable to the robbers, and a canted angle adds to the absurdity of the Homeowner's reaction to the robbers. As for the two shot sizes we used in these samples, the full shot from a distance adds to Power-Man's mystery and the medium shot was merely coincidental since we were trying to film the robbers' reactions to Power-Man.

What didn't work?

There were a couple of shots that we tried getting from both the original storyboard and on-the-spot during filming that unfortunately didn't quite work out! The biggest of these was the robbers' reactions to Power-Man when he first arrived in the scene. This would've featured 3 different close-up shots side-by-side of each robber's reactions (As you can see by the basic masks, our plans for this film changed DRASTICALLY!). We actually were almost able to fit this multi-shot into the final product, but there were a couple of issues we ran into. First of all, our facial expressions for this scene were absolutely ridiculous in that we couldn't keep straight faces if our lives were on the line! Secondly, we underestimated how long this shot was, and it ended up putting us over the 2 minute mark. With these limitations, we sadly had to cut this beloved scene from the film, although removing actually helped us in the end since it DID kind of disrupt the flow of the scene!

Revisiting the editing process for "Super"-Hero!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be revisiting the editing behind "Super"-Hero, how it's going, and what we decided to do differently with our new supply of film! 

It's baking beautifully...

TITLE CARD!!!!

He's working so hard!

For starters, we have done a LOT of additional filming since the last editing phase. Today and yesterday specifically, we reshot the ENTIRE first half of the movie, so Pablo, our main editor, had plenty of new material to work with. Although his job is far from over, he was able to edit roughly half of the new film together, meaning we now have an idea of how our film is going to turn out like! After editing, our Day 3 footage amounted to just over a minute long in length. This discovery allowed us to make adjustments for our 4th day of filming, which wrapped up just a few hours ago! As of now, Pablo remains our only editor, partly since we decided that splitting up editing work would cause too many problems with coordination and software differences. Additionally, we couldn't quite figure out how to have multiple people work on one project at once, so we decided it'd just be easier in the long run if one person handled editing.

As of the time this blog is posted, Pablo has finished roughly 40% of all editing, but the rest of the actual VFX and sound effects remain to be put in place. Part of this is because with our 3rd day of filming, there were a lot of scenes we needed to trim or cut because of time constraints and quality issues. Because of this, Pablo will likely be editing for another week at most, but some finalized editing has already been done! Namely, our music choice for most of the film and transitions have been put in the first 40 seconds of the film. This includes dissolve transitions at the start of the film and even showing Ring camera footage that syncs up with our own filming! In exchange for Pablo handling all things editing, the rest of the group was focused on creating the new and improved storyboard for "Super"-Hero! However, perhaps the best part about all of this is that, after editing, NONE of the footage from Day 3 or 4 needs to be reshot, meaning WE ARE FINISHED!