Video Shoot

December, 2007

With construction and software moving forward, we were finally able to address one of the most exciting parts of the project: shooting footage for the video booth. The story being told in the video would be of a man à la Alistair Cooke; refined, wealthy, and the leader of the cult. Otherwise, his role really was to just deliver instructions: Please don't swear. Don't talk about confidential Google projects. For costumes, we found a robe and pipe at Ursula's Costumes. I wrote the draft of a script several months earlier, which we as a group fine tuned for a couple of hours. We enlisted Andrew Bender to shoot and edit our script. Thanks to some clever reconnaissance and connections, we were allowed to shoot in a beautiful house nearby, probably the most expensive house I've ever been in. The house had been emptied for sale, but filled with staged furniture. I couldn't even afford their staged furniture, let me tell you. But the sellers gave their consent and in we went.

Shooting was lots of fun. We gave Tom a martini glass filled with water, went over the script a few times and banged it out.

I mentioned earlier that we wanted to give confessors a Magic 8-ball-type analysis of their confession, which meant shooting a series of 4-second clips. Those were fantastic, and some of Tom's ad-libs were terrific. He recorded a bunch of them, I present you with two.

After Tom got a little tired of all the recording work, he told the rest of us to put on his robe and cut our own 8-ball clips.

Here's one of mine. It's got some bad language, so it's NSFW, but also it's hard to hear, so you have to turn it up. I promise: no zombies.