a life more awesome: Josh Belanger Art Book

If you didn't know already, one of my roommates is Josh Belanger, who does art for a ton of bands- t-shirts, cd layouts, website stuff, etc. He decided that it was time to put out an art book, and enlisted me to direct a commercial for it. Well, sort of. It was more like "hey, I have an idea for a video to promote the book. Can I use your GoPro?"

The book is already sold out, but I felt like I should write a post about it anyway, 3 weeks later.

We went to Jetpack Comics to film it, and "can you help a little?" turned into 2 days worth of shooting and an hour or so of editing and an hour or so of last minute stuff. The first day, everything came out bad because of the problem with GoPros- you can't see the footage until you plug the camera into a computer. The second day, I brought my laptop and we viewed everything on the spot and finally, after like 5 takes, got one we could use. We thought about having me hit Josh with his own car, but after shooting it 4 different times, we gave up. See, it's pretty impossible to time when to have a car nearly hit someone running out of a store in one continuous shot. A real movie would have people spotting it, stuff timed out with someone directing each person when to run, when to drive, etc. We were doing it with just the two of us. After trying to just guess timing, and Josh running out right when he guessed he would only to find me still sitting there (I started the timer late), we decided to have Josh's phone be on in his pocket so he could yell to me when he was running out. It was astonishing the amount of trouble we ran into. People got in the way in the store and out, timing was all wrong, I couldn't hear him on the phone, etc. It was pretty hilariously horrible, and the last time I floored it and almost actually hit him while trying to make a botched take work.

It was all fun and pretty hilarious, and a little bit like a "director fantasy camp" from shooting different takes and trying different things, to viewing the footage on the spot and making adjustments, to editing it, to choosing music, to then sitting down with the "client" and going over final stuff. A simple idea, a short video, but so much work.