Workflow 36 Frames – Operator

Hey there, void.

It’s ya boy.

Al.

I don’t normally like to show what I am working on until it is finished, but I need to build some kind of presence online so here it is. A telephone.

Yep that’s it. You can hit the back button. That’s all there is.

Well there is a bit more. When I was a kid, I was an only child and my mother worked three different jobs all at different shifts of the day so my day consisted of me finding away to keep entertained. I did so through movies and Cartoons. I always liked the title frames of an old Cartoonnetwork show by the name of Ed, Edd, & Eddy. They always had some sort of “Ed” pun but it gave you a general idea of the episode you were about to use to vaporize some brain-cells with.

So what’s the point? Point is that stuck with me. When I go out to shoot I will take stills at different angles and play with a title card on them to see how they feel. I want to see which one sets the mood and tone for whatever I am trying to show. In this case we are using my old replica pay phone. The song Operator is a song about loss. This guy’s love left him for his best friend and moved to L.A. and the whole time the main character is trying to get the number so he can call and tell them that it doesn’t phase him. He becomes dependant on this Operator or in this case of my project, this phone. This phone is his coping mechanism with the loss, but I didn’t  want the shot to look sad, because the song has a more up beat tempo compared to some of Jim Croce’s other songs with similar subject matter for example “Time in a bottle”, “Lover’s Cross”, and “These Dreams”. But I knew I wanted the Telephone to be the main character of the piece.

I wanted a worms-eye view of the zero key because I wanted to play with the reverse shot of our Sad-lad to be looking up with that look of “Well here we are again”

This one feels too generic in my eyes, but it still felt pretty Okay.