1 Minute Video

For the 1 minute video brief I wanted to do something humorous, which involved both live action, and 3d animation. Basically I wanted to make an instructional video on how to make a cup of tea, but with a twist. I wanted it to be done on the moon. The reason behind this, is because one of the most standard videos people tend to make is instructional videos on something simple. And i wanted to take that something simple, and turn it on its head, to add some edge to it. I wanted the audience to start watching it and think to themselves "oh no, not another instructional video on how to make a cup of tea...how boring" and then by the end of it, completely shattering their minds. Well that was the plan at least.

In my head i knew exactly what i wanted it to look like, so i drew up a storyboard and came up with a script. As for the actor, there was only one person who could bring this video to life, and that was Thomas McCoy, due to his passion for tea.

Heres my original script:

"Hi there, today I will be showing you how to make the perfect cup of tea. We'll be doing it a little different today so we have to hurry. (running into garden)"

"(arrives on moon) That was a fun ride, ok so firstly we need to boil the kettle. (sped up, tom bouncing around on the moon in the background.) Next we add the tea bag and  boiled water. We then leave this for a few minutes and stir. (as he pours the water it starts floating around, tom attempts to get it back into the mug.) "

Ok so while filming the scene inside the spaceship, tom accidently dropped the mug off the desk, so i thought to myself "ooh that would be a nice twist" so i put a note down, basically incase all else failed.
After we finished filming and i started editing the footage together, a few problems began to arise. First of all was we filmed at night, so when tom ran outside you couldn't really see much. Second problem was again with it being night, the 3d rocket didn't really fit into the scene. I tried fixing this by lowering the brightness of the rocket footage. This method sort of worked but still looked a bit sketchy, which was also due to when the rocket blasts off, the surroundings don't light up. I had a solution for the ignition, which was to put a bbq in the middle of the garden, in the rough area where the rocket would be placed, and then squirting petrol on it to cause the surroundings to light up as if a rocket was taking off. (sounds very dangerous, but it would have been very controlled) In the end i decide to reshoot some of the footage during the day, which fixed the problem of the rocket fitting in, and the visibility.

Another problem i came across was the fact that my main actor also had his FMP to finish, so I didn't want to take him away from that too much, so some things were done very last minute. I decided to go with the mug breaking idea, due to time constraints, but i think it added a bit more humour to it, and made it less like a boring instructional video.