June 24, 2007

Another season of Hawaiian Shirt Fridays begin! I hope you enjoyed the video. As I was mentioning earlier, i was not going to produce a video this year. Just didn't feel up to it but some people were asking me why I was not wearing a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays.

Premise
Hawaiian shirts are called "Aloha" shirts in Hawaii and "Aloha" means"Hello" and "Goodbye" - so if you wear a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays - you are saying "Hello" to the weekend and "Goodbye" to the week. My buddy Rick Holcomb convinced me to start wearing them.

Concept

I had been tossing the idea around of how a Hawaiian shirt could have been used in famous movie scenes. I even came up with a poster using the Spiderman III concept. I was thinking of using blue/green screen techniques and before I knew it - I was feeling overwhelmed. Then my friend from work, Fernando found out that I dabbled in video and so did he. So with his help - we produced the video. He helped me with the concept by scaling it down a bit and using a technique that would not require blue/green screen effects.

Remember that old show on HBO called, "Not Necessarily the News." The concept was simple - take some existing footage and then splice in your own. Viola! The idea was born.

The Godfather
Then Fernando stumbled upon this wonderful (and memorable) scene in the first Godfather movie. The entire scene did not have any subtitles so we generated our own. We took a 6 minutes scene and with some creative editing - we got it down to about 2.5 minutes. We also created some props -like the Mobsters for Dummies book. I created it and wrapped it around an existing book. I think it worked out great. But sadly, most of the fun text was lost in the short clip. If you want to read the entire book cover you can click on the image below for a larger image.

Filming
This was tougher but easier than having to do a Blue Screen effect. We filmed my scenes in my house and used some interesting lighting techniques. We both thought really hard about getting the lighting just right but in the end we thought it would be funnier if you KNEW I was spliced in. And the music -that was all Fernando, what a great job. It took alot longer to produce than we anticipated (thanks to some minor learning curves in Final Cut Express) but I am happy with the outcome.

So another season begins and I hope to see you in a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays!

• Thank you Fernando for the "push", concept help, filming and production.
• Thank you Jim for the support and ideas.
• Thank you Rick for the inspiration.
• ...and most importantly, thank you Liz (my wife) for putting up with long hours this hobby extracts from our time.

G-man