When viewing our entry for the 2019 Gawliks it may be apparent that it began as a joke. Me and Adam Sniatkowski were sitting brainstorming a more complex parody idea when Adam wrote a two scene joke “screenplay”. I looked at it and found it to be intensely uncomfortable and thought, what if we were to film a person reading this staring dead eyed at a camera in a faux-50’s television setting. It would be fairly simple to create and could tag into the field of awkward comedy.

1. The first thing was to find a person who could read the script to camera without breaking camera. The first and only choice is Adam who, besides having a natural screen presence, could appropriately nail the delivery.

2. The second was to find a location. We initially were hoping to shoot in a dark room with a single spotlight on the presenter to create an eerie sort of black void. As the idea progressed to include the 50’s TV style we figured a more solid plain background could work but, we still needed to find a quiet dark (so we could have maximum control over the lighting) place to shoot. Then the idea to use the Hunter Seminar Room came to me. We could use the large black TV as a backdrop and the room is not in use during the F-block.

3. When filming we ran into an issue that was absolutely my fault. I wanted to use a 7D but wasn’t too sure about which lense. I believe I ended up using a 2.5mm but I could be wrong. The image looked off and too grainy so we decided to reshoot it the next day. While I cannot comment on which lens I ended up using it was one that we had to shoot at a greater distance with. This can be seen in the photos with the camera rather far from the presenter. The lens was able to shoot far better in the darker lighting giving the image a tad more definition than if the lights were blasting at a higher brightness. For the two different angles we ran through the script in straight run throughs until it could be read without fault for each angle. We decided to have no moving transition between the angles to give it a more awkward and abrupt tilt.

4. The idea for the vomit originated at the end of the first failed shoot. I was talking to Adam while thinking of a way to have the ending pop a bit more. So I asked him if he was okay with fake vomiting on screen and of course he was. For the vomit we used the bottled mixed berry smoothie from the cafeteria to give the liquid a less clear look. During the shoot I placed a plastic sheet under the table so we wouldn’t mess up the room. However we did need to use a different book as we couldn’t cover a library book with smoothie. I went down to Northshire and rooted around in the used book section to find a novel worthy of destruction in such a way and “The Birth of Korean Cool” definitely counts”

5. For the audio we used a simple task-cam set up with a rode mic as back-up. We were worried about getting smoothie on the recorder or mic however we luckily avoided that, though it did smell like fruit afterwards. The music was just a creepy sounding track from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

6. The editing was pretty simple. We used the second angle inserts to disguise editing out the less than stellar moments and emphasize the winner lines. Syncing up two different video clips with different mouth movements with two different audio tracks was a bit of a bugger but it looks pretty alright now that its over and done with.