The making of "Hail to Thee, Ralph King"

With the release of “Hail to Thee, Ralph King” happening tomorrow I’ll spend a little bandwidth today on the process.

This is a project that started as a short script entry for a Halloween contest. The 8-page draft of the script took about two weeks and was completed late October. I spent November working on the sets, creating the characters and assembling/selecting the voice actors. December through February was spent filming and doing the basic edits. Two weeks in March were spent on the sound design, titles and final edits. Total time from twinkle of an idea to export and upload: 5 months at 3-10 hours per week.

Early feedback (family/friends) has been positive but I likely should have spent more time on the script adding some additional character interactions that the contest length requirements limited. MrsBiz indicated that adding a scene between the protagonist and the older female character Rose could have really helped sell the character’s plight. I think she is correct on that one. She and Kid Millions also convinced me to replace a few complex transition effects with more traditional crossfades. The showy transitions called too much attention to themselves and in one case felt like a presentation slide transition. An easy correction with positive results.

 

A bit more Rose perhaps?

Voice Actors

Regarding the voice actors I solicited the help of Ben Tuttle. Ben has voiced characters in several of my previous productions including “Gentrified” and “The Urban Explorer’s Guide…”, and is a very talented creator of his own productions. He’s got a natural style that fits Ambert (our hero) very well.

For Mr. Montero I had a RL forum member in mind but decided to try out Fiver as a voice acting resource. After perusing the many VA’s I selected a VA by the name of Scriptrod. His service cost me $20 (most of the VA services are priced by word count). Service was fast (one day turnaround) and I had a week to request 1 reshoot with any specific changes. Scriptrod’s voice fit the character well but he reads the lines just a bit slow as he enunciates each word very precisely. It’s a touch robotic but ended up being a little creepy for a creepy character. However, my dialog for the ending scene was not very good. It had a touch of the James Bond villain vibe to it and I ended up cutting two or three lines out of the final cut. I also failed to request the scream for the end scene so I had to do that one myself.

I voiced Mr. Ambrose, Rose and a line or two for the other minor characters. I followed some advice from a RL forum thread about voicing a woman. Specifically I voiced it once as I normally would and then changed my cadence and inflection to be very different. Once I changed the pitch I think it turned out pretty good. It’s only three lines but probably my best female performance in a long line of bad ones.

Sets and Style

I created the upstairs workplace (the workplace bullpen and the breakroom) with muted yellows meant to recall both the Egyptian desert and the mundanity of work. The tomb below is a bit more vivid with sharper tones, lighting contrasts and a lot of volumetric spotlights. I created the pyramid tomb to be 35’ tall so that the forklift (visible next to the cremation table) and ladder (visible behind the tv in the storage closet) could realistically reach the top as shown in the final scene. Another critique from MrsBiz was a lack of opulence and treasure in the tomb. Likely a good point.

Going down.

Filming the Scenes and Camerawork

Regarding filming and camerawork I found the 5 character breakroom scene particularly challenging. Setting the characters up and animating them all together was difficult but drinking, eating, chewing and singing is a whole different layer of problems. Overall I’m happy with the scene but I know it has some awkward moments. The scene’s moving camera was a style choice (first rotating from outside the group, then rotating from inside the group) but likely helped hide some of the faults (hope no one got too dizzy).

I committed a cardinal sin at the end (the sarcophagus death) with a clear 180 degree rule breaker. I spent a decent amount of time trying to fix this sequence but in the end I liked the rule breaking shots better than anything I could replace them with so it stayed in there.

A small success occurred when I used physics and initial force to throw the hammer out the opening of the pyramid. I was able to get this working in less than an hour. Would have taken longer to keyframe and looked a lot worse. Hurray for small successes!

Ralph King look on...

Three research notes.

1. Dua is mentioned on the internet as a minor Egyption Goddess of sanitation. The veracity of this claim is dubious but it served a greater purpose.

2. My research into fast acting poisons might have landed me on a list or two and also led me down a Jim Jones rabbit hole that I would have rather stayed out of.

3. I found no evidence of Foreign types with their hookah pipes actually saying Way-O-Way-O-Way.