Captain Chair: The Movie

Our first attempt at making a video. Something we'd not really planned on happening when we arrived on location.

On location

We weren't supposed to be making a movie. We were just going to Ironbridge purely for the reason that the UB Guild of Students would pay for the tickets (due to me standing in the Exec elections) and we fancied a day out.

Andy Christofferson (Dr. Sabbath) shares his memories of the day...

"The giant beefburgers afterwards were AWESOME. Man, now I'm hungry."

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Andy for detailed contributions to this article. Hoping to get a little more detailed information, I approached Chris Collins (Bridge Boy), and asked him about his memories..

"Ummm... eating the food afterwards?"

As good as it is to know that the pub opposite serves really good burgers, I don't think I'll be bothering to ask for their input in any further 'behind the scenes' work.

The plot, what little there is, was pretty much identical to the plot of the promotional comic I was distributing at the time - i.e Dr Sabbath destroys bridge, fight, Bridge Boy/Girl repairs bridge, end. There was originally supposed to be a humorous chase scene, but the memory card on the camera filled up before we got round to that part. In the end everyone contributed to the planning out of what to do, with Emma doing her best to try film what was suggested.

We managed to get a few odd looks for the passersby, through luckily it was a bit on the chilly side and all sensible tourists were at home (either that or they saw us and promptly ran the other way).

Post production

Editing all the stuff together was the next challenge. The camera had everything saved as .mov, so I loaded up Quicktime and attempted to find out how the thing worked. Sound was a problem I never figured out how to work, so the movie remained silent with cards added to explain what was happening.

Unfortunately since I didn't really know what I was doing, when I uploaded it to youtube what resulted was a bit of a mess that didn't play properly. The only solution (other than redoing the thing properly from scratch), was to find somewhere to host the entire 100-odd meg video for download.

It was lucky then that the Guild had given everyone unlimited webspace during the elections. Problem solved!

The director's cut

Ok, ok, so technically there were four directors and only one of them sliced this edition together, but who cares? After a year of living on the Guild server, the video was wiped. Luckily, this coincided with me getting some new editing software, so after only a few hours work we had a new 'youtube happy' cut. Whilst sticking this edition together I discovered an extra bit of forgotten footage - a section of the fight scene I meant to include in the original, but kinda forgot about until it was too late. And sound! Yes, everyone's main complaint about the original was sorted out. Since I'd worked out how to use the software when editing Ride of the Chairs, the only real time consuming process was putting in all the sword clash sounds. That nearly drove me to tears.

The theme tune I'm not entirely happy with, but after listening to countless tracks this was the best I could come up with. If anyone has any suggestions as to a replacement, then I'd be more than happy to listen to them.

- Damian

Credits