SQPN

I’m back with an update on our progress on the Secrets of Indiana Jones. I traveled to the United States last week, and we’ve been working hard to get some shooting done for the series. It turns out to be much more challenging than I thought it would be.

Since we had almost no preparation time for this project (it was a spur of the moment idea), my first task was to come up with scripts. The original idea was to produce seven episodes of about 5-6 minutes each, and talk about religious symbols and themes in the existing three movies (we don’t know much about the plot of the upcoming movie).

I wrote texts for the first four episodes on the second day of my stay in the US. And we started shooting almost immediately after that. And that’s when the problems started!

First problem: the weather. First day: hot sunshine. Second day: cold, mist, rain. And we wanted to shoot hot desert scenes! Not easy.

Second problem: we had no shooting scripts for the small Indiana Jones type videoclips. We had to make up the stories and the shots on the fly.

Third problem: stuff you write down at your computer doesn’t automatically translate well to a video performance. I had gathered lots of information via Wikipedia, but I discovered that I just couldn’t memorize the lines! I guess the jet lag and the huge amount of other things that required my attention just made it very hard to focus. So we had to do a lot of retakes, and I’m not even happy with what we eventually managed to record.

Fourth problem: we got sent away from a shooting location. We wanted to film some stuff over at a university, but we were chased away because we didn’t have permission to film there. We lost lots of time searching for an alternative location.

Fifth problem: I got sick. Really sick. High fever, sore throat, coughing. After a round of antibiotics we restarted production today, even though I feel as if my brain only operates on 50% CPU power.

Sixth problem: audio quality. Wind noise, cars, airplanes, people walking around.. it just seemed impossible to finish a full take. We went back to filming short movie sequences instead of trying to do more talking shots.

Seventh problem: locations. We hoped to film at a train museum, but never heard back from the museum after requesting permission to film there. We tried to film at a river, but the water had risen so much, that we couldn’t get near the water. It’s very hard to find good locations that match the looks of the Indiana Jones movies without requiring us to fly to the other end of the United States!

Where are we now?

So where are we now? We’ve shot almost all the movie sequences for the first four episodes, and we have scripts for those first four episodes as well, but none of the information parts (where the ‘meat’ of the episodes is) have been shot. I need to write three more scripts for the final three episodes, and come up with at least three more mini stories to shoot.

Solutions we’re looking into to speed up production: we’ve been calling some local studios to inquire about green screen studio rental, but the prices are very high (at least $1500 a day). Too expensive for such a small production.

I think we might try to use a super low-cost solution for all the information parts of the seven episodes: we’ll use a Mac in combination with a firewire camera, a set of lights, a green screen and a software program called ‘VideoCue’.

That program has an ‘auto-prompter’, that will enable me to read the texts from a screen without having to memorize them. The result will be less dynamic than if we would film everything on location, but it would speed up production time tremendously, and it might even allow us to wrap up production before I head back to the Netherlands this coming Friday.

We can definitely use your prayers to make this all work out. I am learning a lot, but it’s a very challenging and exhausting experience for all of us. We intend to reach thousands of new people with these videos, and it might be their first encounter with the Star Quest Production Network. So hopefully, it will all be worth it!

Fr. Roderick