Oh is THAT right.

The boy’s favorite piece of film music isn’t by John Williams, or Michael Giacchino, or Zimmer or Herrmann or Goldsmith or Horner or Silvestri or any of the usual suspects.  

It’s a track (“Favela Escape”) by Craig Armstrong, from the score of The Incredible Hulk (2008). 

For three nights we shot this nighttime chase sequence, directed by (and starring) the boy, featuring me as a handful of interchangeable bad guys. He designed each shot to sync to the music, basically editing it in his head as we went. (You can catch him slowing down his run to make shots last longer.)

A few moments are lifted from the film (including a brief exchange in Portuguese), but a lot of it was devised on the fly. 

Criminy he is getting good at this.

Over the holiday break (and in the weeks since), the boy shot a 14-minute remake of Star Wars starring himself, his cousins, and a couple of friends. (Vimeo link) He wrote the script and broke each scene into shots, over four days of shooting. He supervised and directed the editing, and selected and timed each of the music cues. 

But as I mentioned on Oopnet, this all may have been in service of a single moment in the 70-second excerpt above. Somehow he figured out how to pull this off before he turned nine.

Flummox and Friends Trailer (50 sec)

Trailer’s up. Pilot’s live in eight days. 

Caleb might be irked I wasn’t using the final color-corrected video for this. He’s been burning some SERIOUS midnight oil.

A trip down the Giant Slide. At the Alameda County Fair (15 sec)

Zipped inside a six foot beach ball, floating in a pool. At the Alameda County Fair. (1 min 4 sec)

Last night he drew his first animation, and I got to introduce him to Frameographer. 

(We’ve been watching HUGO.)

I made a video from the set of Flummox and Friends (as an update for Kickstarter backers).

Some of it was even in focus. [YouTube link]

The assignment said “Make it! Draw it! Sculpt it! Paint it! Build it! Write it! Create it! The choices are endless and open-ended!”

So, of course, he made a TV show.

Yes, he is shamelessly ripping off Beakman. In his defense I was ripping off Monty Python and SCTV bits all the way through high school.

Trailer #3.

Clearly a lot of work went into developing the iMovie trailer templates, from the title animations to the shot suggestions to the original scores recored with the London Symphony Orchestra. And I’ll grant that I don’t have a better idea about how to motivate people to edit and share their home movies. 

But if you’re going to use standard home movie footage, these trailers are kind of wildly discordant. Even the examples Apple cut together for the template chooser aren’t especially successful (running the gamut from cheesy to non sequitur).

But for a group of imaginative children ready to “make a movie”, these are kind of @#$%ing brilliant.

This was one of the funnest days I recall having as a dad. (Trailer 1 | Trailer 2)

…and here’s Trailer #2. We snuck a few Action Movie Effects into this one.