Heroic Stand-ins. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and others populate the storyboards.
Cartoon Storyboard
With the digital sets in place, Robertson built storyboards for each of the film’s 700 scenes.
Rather than spend money on traditional hand-drawn illustrations to identify the main poses of a shot, Robertson pasted Cartoon Network animation models of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman onto the digital scenes.
“I had a PowerBook,” he explains, “so later on, during the shoot, I could flip through the storyboard when I wanted to show the actors what building or object they would be standing in front of or behind.
“In one scene, the storyboard shows actors walking down a hallway. But when we shoot, they’re really just walking in place against the greenscreen. We had a lot of fun with that technique. Old films used a lot of rear projection — Jimmy Stewart driving down a road that’s fading away behind him, for instance — and ‘Able Edwards’ is all rear projection.”
40 Hours of Mini-DV
Robertson used a Canon XL1 to shoot 40 hours of mini-DV tape in weekend shoots over the summer.
“I had this 12-inch Lone Ranger doll and I put him in front of a green cloth. Then, in Final Cut Pro, I edited the shot so the Lone Ranger was standing in front of a building.”
“We thought about shooting on Beta or High Def,” he says, “but we didn’t have the money. If we hadn’t had the mini-DV or the Mac, the film wouldn’t have gotten done.”
After each shoot, Robertson imported the digital video into Final Cut Pro, logged the content, set the in/out points and rendered them as QuickTime files.
The Urban Lone Ranger
“Working with Final Cut is like having all the tools you need in front of you and you just get to play with them. It’s pretty amazing,” Robertson says.
“For instance, Final Cut has a good keying program, which is a great way to prep. I’d throw the footage onto the Mac, pull out the green and get a general idea of how the scene was going to look.
“When I first started developing the ‘Able Edwards’ scenario,” Robertson says, “keying was probably the first tool I used. I had this 12-inch Lone Ranger doll and I put him in front of a green cloth. Then, in Final Cut Pro, I edited the shot so the Lone Ranger was standing in front of a building.
“It looked great. I knew we could do ‘Able Edwards.’”
Paper Props. To create the digital sets, Robertson combined elements of different photographs he’d scanned from library books.
Sandwiching Scenes
When Bailey and Robertson were satisfied with the edits, Robertson began working on the final cut as if he were creating an animated film, combining layers of digital backgrounds with 3D renderings and live footage.
He began by importing the greenscreen QuickTime files into Combustion. Then he replaced the green screen with the digital backgrounds and, when the scene called for them, foreground components such as a pile of rubble or an android on a gurney.
When he had finished the composites, Robertson brought the files back into Final Cut Pro and assembled the finished film.
When the film was complete, he stored the entire movie — 19 gigabytes in a DV compression format — on a 40GB iPod and carried it to a processor to burn the DVD master.
Accessible Moviemaking
“When I first told people about the project,” Robertson muses, “they’d say ‘Whoa, that’s a lot of work.’ But it’s not really work. When you’re enjoying yourself and learning and solving problems, it’s a good time.
“Francis Ford Coppola,” he adds, “once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio would borrow her dad’s camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking.
We like to think that we are that little fat girl.”
