No Wasted Motion

Back after a couple-week hiatus, Loading Time returns! This week we’re looking at Efficiency.

The annual LoadingReadyRun Christmas video is always a tough one to write. We’ve covered basically every aspect of the holiday season – we’ve made everything from loving parodies of Charlie Brown to a horror movie spoof in celebration of Christmas. And while I did take point on writing this year’s Christmas video, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not all that seasonal. It’s much more about how we perceive the holiday than that actual holiday. Its a Christmas video with no tinsel, reindeers, trees, snow, angels, santa, elves, presents or anything else that’s become a commercial symbol of the holiday. That, as far as I’m concerned, makes this one of the most genuine and authentic Christmas videos ever created.

With Graham away during the shoot, this video was primarily directed by Paul who was the master behind the camera. Paul made most of the decisions, but everyone involved helped come up with additional ways to spice up the look of the video. When you have a script that is very heavily weighted towards making a lot of conversations look exciting, figuring out camera angles and dynamic movements can go a long way to keeping a viewers attention. (For an excellent example of this see Skyfall! There is a scene where James Bond is talking over the radio to Q, who is looking at some monitors. Rather than cut back to a static shot of Q and sucking all the energy out of this part of the movie, we get a series of low angle shots where the camera slowly moves around Q’s face. Standing still and looking at a screen has never seemed so thrilling!)

The cast for this video was also nicely rounded out by a bonus Andy, who happened to be in town. You can see a bit of it in the video, but Andy adds notes and suggestions to all his scripts. It embarrasses me to say this, but I think Andy may have put more thought into his character’s motivations than I did while writing the video … But let me know what you guys thought in the comments.

Also, be sure to check out a bonus Loading Time we put up yesterday, covering some more of Rapidfire!