The Making of "A Day In The Life"

As she leaves the house, that is the actual exterior of my house and Rogue's Saturn. The late afternoon sunlight doubles for what should be morning. I physically took off the back license plate as she drives away (again, doing all her own stunts) even though it appears to have been done digitally. The walking scene above was part of the location shoot on the 4th week. It was the last sunny day of the autumn, and you can clearly see a lot of leaves on the ground.


The elevator shots are both green screen. I had originally intended for us to do these on location but we had the green screen set up anyway for the restaurant scenes and decided to just grab these as well. I shot the background plates a few days later as I was going to a business meeting in an office building. It's harder than you think to get a particular elevator to arrive empty when you have an entire bank of them. Eventually I got what I needed.


The office scene is a great example of getting amazing results while even in a huge hurry.  While I had spent over an hour setting up the restaurant scene (which I'm not entirely happy with), I rigged up the green screen for the office scene in about five minutes as Rogue was waiting around. On the left you can see this is a real office set up (where I'm typing this right now) in a corner in my basement. But using the magic of green screen, Rogue appears to be in a much larger room that extends far behind her (courtesy a still I found on the internet). The clock on the wall behind her is an actual functioning clock inserted into the background, note the time change from when she arrives to when she leaves. 


The restaurant scene was done entirely and rather obviously with green screen. On the left you can see a production still without color correction, on the right the finished composited shot. You'll note Rogue was sitting on the right side when we shot it but I flipped the entire scene because when I was editing it made more sense for her to arrive from the left side and exit that way rather than how we shot it. She is flipping the bird as a joke because for that shot I only needed my half of the frame, the bit with her half had already been recorded with myself also playing the waiter standing behind her. A little bit of split-screen magic and all three of us could appear together in one frame. The Jessica mask with the punched hair that I had been waiting for all summer finally made its debut here in this scene, worn of course by me. Rogue originally imagined a room full of people behind us but that would have meant getting the footage somehow (again, I used a still I found on the internet), plus permission from everybody to use it, etc. I decided instead to borrow a page from the old British TV series "The Avengers" where they never used extras even in places where you would expect to see crowds. It made shooting easier but also less distracting as I wanted people focused on the mask, not what was going on in the background.


This nice, crisp October day was perfect for shooting although I had to carefully plan all the locations to make sure the sun would be the right position. This looks like a straight-forward shot, just walking into the building, but it took nearly 10 minutes due to people hanging around in the shot and having to wait for them to move out of the way. Meanwhile I'm standing there with my large video camera mounted on a tripod on the corner sidewalk of a very major intersection in Seattle trying to look inconspicuous. Dave (our goon) was positioned just inside with the shopping back ready to hand Rogue as she walked in and then immediately came out again.


All the scenes in the shop mirror were shot on the 3rd week with the tri-fold mirror set up in my garage between two green screens, one behind it, and the other behind the camera. The trick was to find the sweet spot where you couldn't see the camera but you would get a clear shot of Rogue in all three mirrors.  The background is a still I took myself in a nearby shop.


Rogue drives her Saturn back to the house but something is wrong, the steering wheel on the right side! I have flipped the shot to maintain the left-to-right movement of the scenes before and after. The placement of the house doesn't really make sense in relation to the morning scene when she left, but most people won't notice that. If you live in the UK or Australia, there is of course nothing wrong with this scene.


This is a good example of what is known as "day for night" filming. This was shot late in the afternoon on our sunny day with half the building in shadow (inset). By darkening it and adding some blue, it looks like nighttime. While we were shooting this (two days before Halloween), the owner of the bar came out and asked what we were doing. I told him the truth, more or less ("a promotion film"), and promised I would cover up the sign outside the building that identified the business (that odd rectangle in the upper-center of the frame).


The nightclub scenes were part of our massive second week of shooting (along with the green screen work). The "set" was a piece of black cloth hung on the wall with some Christmas lights hanging along the top. I always planned for this to be a dolly shot but the dolly I planned to borrow was ironically already being used that day for another music video (one that paid!). So I mounted my camera on a low TV stand with wheels and rolled it past Rogue. I had pre-recorded someone singing the lyrics and played them back as we shot so Rogue could lipsynch to them. Rogue owns that microphone, but today it was just a non-functioning prop. The previous dancing shot includes my third and final appearance in the movie in a black wig and my back to the camera.


Rogue hears a woman yelling "Help! Help! Help!" (taken from an old "Underdog" cartoon show) and runs into the Ladies room, actually a back storage room in my house with a sign stuck to the door. The interior of the rest room is a real bathroom in my house. I had to use a wide-angle lens on the camera which caused a bit of spatial distortion. It was difficult to synch up the transition between Rogue in her nightclub outfit and the superheroine outfit with the camera move. It could have been better, but the fire effect hides a lot of the flaws.


Rogue's most challenging scene was running in the outdoor scenes because just before she arrived on the set, the heel on her boot broke off! With no time to fix it we just went ahead and shot and she attempted to compensate for it when moving. In addition, because I was using such a long lens for this shot, I had to rack the focus as she got closer. Amazingly, we did this in one take. This location, done the evening of the final day of shooting, was the one place I had permission to film at: behind the place where I rent a shop for mask making. Although it was a bit chilly, at least it was dry outside; the next day it began raining and never really stopped, so we really got lucky with the weather.


Rogue plays the woman being mugged, this time wearing the same Susan mask that I wore in my Outdoor video last year, along with a black wig. The goon mugging her was our friend Dave.


As you can read in my interview with Rogue, the script did not specify what kind of superheroine it would be and it was assumed she would just fight the mugger physically. When we came up with a fire-based heroine, it was a simple matter of digitally adding some fire (a stock effect) and having her hurl a fireball instead.


The puff of air as Rogue exhales is not a special effect. It really was that cold outside. But it was a nice touch, as if her hand had been smoking.


This looks straight-forward enough, but in fact it was shot in the middle of the afternoon with sun streaming in from the outside. I set up the green screen outside the door and then keyed everything black to simulate night outside as she returns home after a long day.