Ride of the Chairs

Another elections, another movie. Almost something of a tradition.

Background

Originally, this was set to be the third movie, but was moved up the schedule because it seemed like it'd be a hell of a lot easier to film. The idea came from the (re)editing of Captain Chair the Movie, when I was trying to locate the Ant and Dec classic 'Let's get ready to rumble' in the depths of my laptop. I came across Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries', and the idea that this could be simply created in chair form by gathering together as many people as possible and having them ride about the Birmingham University campus on chairs. Simple!

Filming

Of course whilst filming itself would be easy, the gathering together of a large group of people willing to make a fool of themselves in the name of...art(?) was a lot more difficult. In the end there was five of us, but of course only four made it into the film as one had to film the thing.

Problem 1 - moving on the chairs. This was a lot more difficult then I expected. I was hoping that since I had planned a lot of short shorts, this wouldn't prove to be much of a problem, but I was very wrong. The genius idea of filming us going backwards (which was far easier to do on the chairs) and then reverse the video in post, appeared to be the way forward (but was not later without it's own problems).

Still, off we set going backwards in front of the Aston Webb building. And then the rain came.

Filming began again in the Guild. Luckily this being the Guild, there was pretty much no one about to get in the way and after a couple of hours we had about 2 minutes of footage in the can. Progress was a lot slower than I imagined.

Andy recalls,

"God dammit it's 4 and I still haven't done ANYTHING."

Oh, wait, that's a comment about the amount of work he's done today. What he actually said about filming was:

"Falling down the stairs was exciting."

This idea gave the video a much-needed ending. Driving round the Guild was ok, but would have grown very tiresome to watch after a while (especially since we were lacking people and interesting footage).

Post

Problem. Try as I might, I couldn't find any (free) software that would reverse my video clips (and thus make everyone look as though they were going forwards). This was a big disappoitment to say the least. It took a couple of days of searching before I found anything capable of doing the job, and then a load more time trying to work out how to operate the software.

But we got there...eventually. Even if we were short of a few seconds of video to match the music (resulting in the addition of some of the unaltered 'backwards' footage).

- Damian

Credits