Detective (2004) - Detective was created as a test to see if I could produce a high quality black and white film look from low grade digital video. When I realized that the video camera's black and white mode was exactly the same as the color mode but desaturated, I decided that I would make a black and white video, but shoot it in color and use After Effects to see how far I could push the video into a filmic black and white look. This would also give me the latitude to use any color sequences I shot whithout having to worry about a reshoot. A few scenes in the video were shot with a three CCD Sony TRV 900. However, they had to be heavily modified, adding grain and bluring effects to get them to match the single CCD sony TRV 25 that was readily available to me at the time. The scene where the Detective stares into the camera for an extended period of time is an homage to the films of Japanese director Takeshi Kitano, whose films often feature similar tableaus. Since the video was in black and white in the present, I decided to make all the flashbacks in washed out color. The scene where the "high life" is living the detective is footage farmed from my documentary, Real Life Adventures 30: I Don't Drink, where John (who also plays the detective) snorts crushed caffeine pills. In the scene where The Detective sits on the couch and the venetian blinds create a pattern on his body, a separate mask had to be added in After Effects where the blinds cast a shadow on his body and it was adjusted to make them appear more stark. When the sequence came where the Detective is being followed, I knew that I wanted a shot from up high, like a crane shot, that would then zoom in on the action of The Detective walking and then on the man walking behind him. But I didn't have a way of shooting it. Luckily, a few days before the shoot, I noticed a woman sunbathing on the roof of my apartment building, and was able to use the roof to shoot down from. Though now it might seem derivative of a film like Sin City, Detective was completed almost a year and a half before that film was released, and over a year before I had seen any footage or still images of the production of the celebrated comic book film. Click on one of the links below to view the video Click here to return to the segments menu. |