Brock here from Studio 8. We've gotten several requests to talk about how and (perhaps why) we produced the "Problem With Horsey/Here to Help" promo for The Daily Reel. So let's jump into that, shall we?

THE WHY:
A few weeks ago, TDR asked Studio 8 if we'd like to shoot a commercial for their ReeledIn web community. Within two days, we had a fresh idea and got a script green-lighted. It's a pretty weird little concept, and at first, it was more of a literal commercial. For instance, instead of me saying, "You better use an internet to fix it," I was originally supposed to say something like, "Log onto TheDailyReel.com and ask someone in the ReeledIn community about it." They didn't want it to be so straight-forward.

So the end product (we hope) feels less like a commercial and more like a quirky, short video that happens to have a logo for The Daily Reel tacked on the end of it. But because it's about making a video and people helping each other, it's still fairly related to ReeledIn's community and what-not. Right?

THE HOW:
Shooting
All the horse stuff was, of course, shot in front of a blue screen. I know that green screens are what's hot right now, but a couple of years ago, we worked on a movie and some birds poopoo-ed on this huge blue screen and one of the grips gave it to us and now that we've got a decent camera, we're able to finally make good use of it. So Rory and I got gussied up in our best cowboy duds and pretended to stiffly ride horses for about 10 minutes. We were careful not to move our legs too much, since we knew we'd have to wedge the horses in between them and the less movement, the easier the editing would be.

The computer room stuff was pretty easy. We had to fake the bedroom door as the house's front door, which was easily done by using our much smaller green screen to cover up the outer room and make it look like Vlad was standing on our front porch.

Editing
In the scenes where you look over Java's shoulder at the computer screen, our second monitor was doing the flashy scrolling thing, so we had to get real creative there. We used that angle twice, so in the first one, if you go back and watch it, you'll notice that Java's upper torso and head don't move AT ALL. That's because to get rid of the screen flicker, I just used a freeze frame of the upper left half of the shot and superimposed that over the video. So Java's hands move, but his top half doesn't. Bet you didn't notice that the first time, huh? In the second shot, Java's upper half moves too much, so I had to create a 8-Point Garbage Matte and cut out the flickering screen with keyframes and all of that mess. Yucky!

Oh yeah, we use Final Cut Pro to edit most of our stuff.

When we wanted to show the footage on the monitor, we edited those chunks and had to output them as videos with all the effects finalized so then we could just shrink it all down to fit on the monitor. Does that make sense?

For the horse scenes, we used an 8-Point Garbage Matte to cut out our back legs and feet and then stuck pictures of the horses under our front legs, so it looks like we're actually riding them. When my horse fizzles out, I just used a few Video Filters like Bad TV with keyframes and added sound effects to make it seem like it was "malfunctioning".

There are lots of editing tricks in this video, lots of implied stuff like the gunshots, horses clomping, and ducks quacking.

Overall, it was a very fun shoot that only took a couple of hours and an educational edit job that took a day and a half or so.

We'd like to thank The Daily Reel for trusting in our nutty ideas and letting us produce the video. It's honestly one of my favorite things we've done thus far and I hope it gets this site some good exposure. Thanks for reading and feel free to contact me with any further questions/comments.

Peace,

Brock LaBorde