Part 4 of Prehistoric Insanity's biggest cyber video yet. Though mind you this will seem like nothing once I get around to the 200 parts of Hardcore Apocalypse! First though we must finish the Training Video and its story...
It was super late April of 2004 me and Dan both arrived in Drumheller about a week before work at the Tyrrell. Our mission to attempt to finish the training video in time for actual staff training. Typically training occurs over the first 2 weeks of the summer giving us a window of 3 weeks. Like so many portions of this production this deadline element simulated a professional environment. I think Prehistoric Insanity could cope and then some!
We immediately jumped on filming program sequences as fast as we could think of them. The goal was to make each of them as entertaining as possible while at the same time being unique.
First up we filmed one of my pet favorites the Hoodoo Hunter for the Badlands Guided Hike. This proved a slightly challenging shot simply due my stunt of rolling down the hill.
In this initial period of time we also encountered our first censorship issue. During reading week me and Will had popped out into the snowy badlands to film a Dinosite clip. It was deemed too much of an inside joke, and only useful if one was already familiar with Dinosite... So me and Dan hijacked Brad to help us refilm a new sequence. On the spot we came up with the idea of Billy the child Dan would play that would become a running gag.
Returning to the museum we quickly filmed the prep table, which ironically would follow Dinosite in the film as well. Returning to the mansion (my home for the first month of 04) we also filmed the summer day camp clip. This would for a little while hold the record for number of bad takes as I messed up my lines 6-8 times.
Me and Dan were given a deadline for a rough copy within the first week which pushed up the pressure. At this point we still needed Daydigs, Excavate It, and Mission Infossible. From the beginning we'd envisioned Mission Infossible as a trailer. However initially I'd wanted to make it using clips from real movies, primarily Matrix...
As it turned out my technological situation won't allow us to capture the clips from these movies though. At the time this was seen as a disaster. With 2 days to go we made a rush effort to get all 3 missing programs done.
We swallowed our pride and aimed to do a very quick and dirty homemade trailer of Mission Infossible. All components of the trailer were filmed in a miraculous half and hour span, and half that time was spent driving down the hill to the Drumheller sign. The rest was filmed around the Mansion. Our line reader Sylvie was one of the new roommates who'd just moved in that night (and as fate would play out she and her boyfriend would move out the next night...). Out of desperation and time conservation we had her read her lines like a bystander in a Buckley's commercial. At the time we thought this whole effort was a crappy jury rig solution. It would turn out to be one of the funniest things we've EVER done!
Later that same night we filmed the lego segments. This effort took us till 3am. Part of the problem being the longer we went the more tired and silly we got. A single line critical for a staff member to know took me 30 minutes to get right (I kept inverting the word bone and stone in the sentence).
With all that filmed I then began the frantic process of editing which I pulled off in record time. Last step was to grab our narrator Megan and record ALL the voice overs in less then 2 hours which was amazing on her part as I didn't have a proper script for her (a common theme with Prehistoric Insanity productions...).
Now we had a complete rough copy of the film. Project done you might think. Well in a perfect world yes. However there was still our last major disastrous hurtle as you'll see... in part 5.
Till then enjoy part 4!
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