I actually had to work until noon on Saturday, the day of the reshoots. Channing was supposed to go to his office (we shot in his conference room to avoid cat interference) and set up before I got off work. He was also supposed to get a big lollipop before I met him at noon. Unfortunately he didn't do either of those things, but he did get a pizza so at least we didn't starve to death.
Anyway, one of the first things we did once we got all of our stuff inside was head out to get a big lollipop. I see them every time I go to walgreen's, so I thought it wouldn't be a big deal to find one again. But I guess they had to get rid of the big lollipops to make space for more mellowcreme pumpkins and candy corn, because they didn't have them anymore. We went to a few other candy stores in Chinatown, but none of them had big lollipops. This seemed like it took forever because it was rainy and I was getting upset. At one point I almost settled on using a popcorn ball instead, but I just couldn't do it. So we ended up calling five different candy stores and driving 20 minutes to the only one that had what we were looking for. It was in Berkeley and the guy working there was pretty awesome. He knew everything about every candy! So finally we had what we needed, but I still had to paint it with food coloring to get rid of the blue and green stripes, since those were the reason we had to reshoot the lollipop scenes to begin with.
I made two new outfits for Barnaby. The old one was a cute blue-green plaid vest, but some parts of the fabric were too close to the color of the greenscreen, so the old footage had gaping holes of background shining through Barnaby's fat little body. This is the same problem we had with the lollipop, in case you couldn't tell. So I made a new vest! We're using a bluescreen for the reshoots instead of a greenscreen, but I was still worried that the new vest had some flecks of green in it. So I made a simple orange bowtie as well. We liked it because it makes Barnaby seem like one of Fozzie Bear's fashion influences, but we liked the vest and hat better. So hopefully both will work and we can cut back and forth between the two in a magical fashion.
As you can see the bluescreen we used was kind of magical! It's a grey fabric that comes with a special blue light that you attach to the camera lens. We attached it with fishing wire, since we couldn't figure out how it was actually supposed to stay on. Anyway, the grey fabric is reflective, but it only reflects blue light (or magic, or something) so it appears to the camera to be blue. Pretty cool! Channing's work owns this system, and supposedly it eliminates the need to get all the wrinkles out of the screen before shooting. I hope it works!
So I hope we did a good enough job this time. I'm a little worried about difficulties keying out the 2-tone blue coat and wrinkles in it, but Channing assures me it will be fine.
