BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE BIG DOOR BIG DOOR VIDEO

We love movies. We’re often making introductory videos for other companies; we call them Big Door videos. When it came to making an introduction video for ourselves— a Big Door Big Door video, if you will—we wanted to really kick it in the pants and show what we really love about movies. We were adamant that we wanted something that showed off who we are and what we love without being too explainy. The finished result looks better than we anticipated—enough so that we wanted to share a little about how we made it.

When we first decided on the concept for this video, I don’t think we fully realized what it would involve. We were like, “Time travel! Hilarious!” and then in writing and pre-production we realized what a mess we made for ourselves. We really needed to commit to our production to make it convincing, and with just 6 people on the crew and everyone taking on multiple roles including acting, it was going to be tricky.

But we forged ahead and decided to go all-out and designed the most challenging shot of the film—the tracking shot seen when the future and present versions of Jack and Daxson are all walking in the frame together. The one challenge, of course, is that we needed to match the motion of the camera for two separate shots, and we had to improvise a motion control device.

In a stroke of genius, we bought an ice cream maker from a thrift store. We tied a wire to the ice cream bucket and tied the other end to our dolly. It required an operator to bear-hug the contraption to keep it still and switch the ice cream maker on and off at the right moments to make it work. With several rehearsals we were able to get it down without too much trouble.

In order to composite the two images, we used a combination of split-screen and green screen. We decided to only key out the bottom portion of the screen—keeping it away from the character’s faces where your eye tends to look makes the composite image look better and helped avoid a lot of the halo effect involved in complete green screen.

Here you can see the process and how the shots came together.

Here’s another shot that was tricky. There is no green screen involved here—
just a split screen right down the middle and some pretty precise rack focusing.

The stop-motion mechanical hand was something we were excited to try out—we were really looking for that classic Phil Tippett -style look and were really happy with how it turned out.

Most of the rest of the shoot was pretty straightforward but involved a lot of precise planning, sticking to the storyboards while still leaving some room to roll with the punches.

We’re pretty happy with what we ended up with. Hopefully our influences and passion came through. It was fun to learn as we went. On set, Jack said, “It kind of feels like we’re in the garage of Industrial Light and Magic back in the early days.” And that felt pretty exciting.