Acting Out: A Fan Video In The Making

In an effort to stay creative, I've started just doing my own projects. One of these, which I hope to have completed before the end of July, is being loosely called "Sad Robot" or "Lonely Robot."

Here's the back-story: working at Banana Republic, we have a bunch of songs that play all day long. There is a variety of maybe 15 or 20 songs. Sometimes songs are added or detracted, but not often. So I hear the same songs, over and over, every day, all day long. One song that stuck out to me in particular was "I Am Not a Robot" by Marina and the Diamonds. As I listened, a narrative began to develop in my head. When I saw the video, however, I was a little disappointed. There were no robots! Certainly it was my duty to amend this. And so, I'm attempting to create a "fan video" in which I overlay her audio over my video, and pray that I don't get sued. I may send a fruit basket or something preemptively.

I have planned and plotted, and even made a storyboard! Check out a piece of it:

Rudimentary, I know, but it gets the point across to me, which is what matters. I also kind of think this particular shot is hilarious the way I drew it!

Anyway, I'm now working on building the robot costume. Once that is finished, I will start looking around for cast and crew. I don't want to commit people until I know I can set a shoot date. I have a couple of people already who have volunteered time and resources, so I think things will go along pretty smoothly. I need a few more people, mostly kids and guys to play mad scientists, an editor, some locations, a van, and the completed costume. The editor will probably be the most important, since I want to add visual effects and go in and out of slow-mo.

Here's where the robot is so far:

Doesn't it look like it does something? Cool, huh?

I pretty much gutted a couple of telephones. I'll be adding some more stuff, I found a lot of it through freecycle and people who were just super duper generous!