Hey, That's Swell!

 

Excerpt of proof of concept test for ocean wave effect in Halfland's beach scene.

Very slowed-down, very jittery gif of a test clip to see if my super down-and-dirty idea for

making the ocean for Halfland's opening sequence has any merit.

So,  my mind gets to wanderin'. Often. And I've been a half-assedly wonderin' whether there might be any way at all for me to build an additional little set piece of the ocean/beach/shore that reveals the mermaid and her dive into the waves at the start of the film series. My mind went wanderin' about it because it seemed like my driving irl to any beach with the puppets and shooting gear to film the scene live action a few times was getting more and more improbable. I've tried hyping myself up to do it. I've tried hiring talented friends to do it for me. But the idea of doing it is fading out of reach. I am fully a recluse at this point and unrepentantly so.

The wildly radical idea “to not go to the beach at all” occurred to me the other day. Could I build a sort of handmade beach instead? I didn't think I was up to that, so many sets have been built already, and another one, perhaps the most challenging, was too much to consider. IF I were to, however, it would have to be very small, very quick to make, and as uncomplicated as possible.

Made a little mock-up of how I was willing to do it to see if it did anything promising, and it really did, in a crude, handmade, Halflandian world sort of way.

I would take the actual set outside in the sunshine to film it. The greatest fault in making such an audacious move from an actual beach to a small homemade one would be losing the powerful sense of it being a real world, in contrast to the rest of the visit to Halfland's more primative folktale reality. We'll see how it goes. My digital editing capabilities at this stage are null. When I tried last year to make a green-screen composite as an underwater effect test, it was a bigger flop than a beached whale, poor things. It didn't look believable in the slightest. Zero illusion. I'm willing to try, though. Not sure how I'll tackle rendering what I need. My plan at the moment is to keep my head down and move fast, meaning that it will be extremely brief and handled like a sketch, funky, but you'll hopefully go with it**.

I've already scrounged around the house for all the materials and essentially already fully built the new beach set. It's not pictured in this post yet, but it's about a 5-foot-wide sandy shore and 3' deep layered water to the horizon.

The motion of the waves is driven by twisted blades spun on dowels beneath the layers. The only action I'll need it to accomplish is to serve as a "vast" background for the mermaid reveal as she turns toward the camera to exhale, followed by a dissolve to a closer shot of the small puppet tail diving into the waves at the shore. That's it. The next cut will be to the small stunt puppet filmed in a fish tank, composited into the underwater footage Dick Kaneshiro has shot while in his natural habitat as a Californian surfer.

After that, we pop up on the Halfland main set and it's all jake from there.

** I saw a clip from a very old B/W movie the other day, and the rear projection screen behind a car in the scene was really jumpy and unconvincing. I was on board, though, for the Hollywood heyday movie magic, where poorly done visual effects got the storytelling job done perfectly well. Yeah, I'm for that. It'll be swell.