Discuss all things Ghostbusters here, unless they would be better suited in one of the few forums below.
By Alex Newborn
#423419
Well, I still can't upload true video, but I checked my messages on YouTube the other day and there was a guy on there wondering about my costume and proton pack progress, so I'm working on a couple of photo-montage videos using the Narrate Timeline function.

Here's the first one, enjoy!



Alex
By Alex Newborn
#424738
fixer79 wrote:Great video yet again, Alex!

You did a stage production of Little Shop of Horrors?! THAT's awesome!
Where can we find more info about that?
Well, if you saw this 2nd place pic of Brandon Balentine from the GBFans' costume contest, you've already seen my set and the largest puppet.

Image

Brandon came and brought his Ecto to promote the show on opening night, and afterwards said he had an idea for some photos. I was the photographer and they came out really good considering my camera has no flash... but the great thing about a stage set is all the lights face it!

~~~

So, some background info. Little Shop was the first play I ever acted in, way back in 1989, and that same director asked me back twice more at other venues, in 1991 and 2008. I was approached about possibly directing it last October, right in the midst of making my Ghostbusters uniform.

I've directed some other plays before, but never a musical, which was intimidating. But there are some other musicals I'd love to direct some day, and I figured there was no better transitional show than Little Shop to be my first musical.

One of the highlights of this show was having the absolute perfect Audrey, a college classmate of mine named Amber Rhodes, come audition for me. Only twice in my directorial career have I ever had my 'dream actor' for a part show up at the audition on their own, and in this case I wasn't the only one who knew Amber was the one. When I told my wife a year before that I might direct Little Shop, she instantly suggested Amber.

Now, I saw three girls who could have potentially played Audrey, but Amber had the purest voice so she was the clear favorite. I was searching for more male vocalists, though, so I didn't post the cast list for almost a week. Amber messaged me on Facebook to ask if she could audition again, because she didn't think she had done well. I thought that was so true to the character-- Audrey doesn't believe in herself either! I nearly drove her crazy, because all I replied was "You did fine", even though in my head I wanted to say, "No need... I will soon be hearing you sing on a daily basis for six weeks."

~~~

For the puppets, we used the same ones from the 1989 show. And the original Seymour from that show came and played Mr. Mushnik for this one, so that was great fun to connect the past show to the current one.

The plant grows ever-larger, which is done with four different sizes of puppet. I puppeteered Pod 1 myself, along with the leaves of Pod 3, and the giant Pod 4, which was quite a workout. I lost two inches off my waist in four days. My sons both appeared in the Skid Row number, it had now become their first play too, and my youngest-- a huge Muppet fan-- got to puppeteer the tongue of Pod 4, standing inside it alongside me.

I had one new puppet (Pod 2) built for a special effect switcheroo, and for that I went to my friend Jaime Hitchcock in Tennessee. Not only is she a Ghostbuster, she's a puppet-builder too.

Jaime came and saw the Saturday night performance, along with Jud Hudson, and they picked a great night because Brandon was back with his Ecto out front.

Here's the album of pics Jaime took all throughout the show.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 557&type=3

And if you want to browse some of the behind the scenes stuff, check out the Facebook page that I made for the event.

http://www.facebook.com/events/370629603009982/

I hope those slake your curiosity. Wish everyone here could have come and seen it.

Alex
By Alex Newborn
#424739
pferreira1983 wrote:Gosh, these videos are so cool. Want to see more! :-D
Go to the 'Proton Pack' section here, and go to the thread 'Alex Newborn's Proton Pack'.

I've posted four videos in that thread detailing the construction of my pack.

They're mostly photo-montage with voiceover, but right after I made the video posted at the top of this page, it occurred to me that I could also use the webcam to shoot video host segments to pepper in.

Alex
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By fixer79
#424830
Hey Alex,

Thank you very much for the info!

That show looks GREAT! Gotta love those plant puppets!

I sure wish I could've been there!


Oh- you're right by the way, Amber looks like an awesome Audrey! :)

Thanks again for the info and the links, Alex! I really appreciate it! ;)
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#446244
Alex Newborn wrote: excerpt from 'Mousebusters' episode of Married With Children


I don't think I ever did upload that clip when the other computer died.

But I did just find where someone had posted that entire episode. The credits say 1988, so they re-ran it in '89 to cash in on the sequel. I remember the commercial really played up the khaki flightsuits, and even showed a 'no-mouse' graphic against black that does not actually appear in the episode.



Alex
#449440
Alex Newborn wrote:But I did just find where someone had posted that entire [Mousebusters] episode [of Married with Children]. The credits say 1988, so they re-ran it in '89 to cash in on the sequel.
Alas, just a month later and that link no longer works.

Luckily, someone else posted it!



The term Mousebuster is not actually used in the episode itself. It came from a commercial they made in 1989 to cash in on GB2 by re-airing that 1988 episode.

Image



~~~

Also, a minor update regarding my playlist:

Since even I was having trouble finding specific clips among the 5+ hours, I have just added info to the description on each video that will tell you the clip it contains and what time on the video to skip to.

Alex
#4943333
Hey gang, I thought it would be better to add this here than to create another thread, so I apologize if this is all a bit dusty. I haven't been in here to clean in a while.


I recently went through several of the videos in my Summer of '89 playlist on YouTube and collected all the behind-the-scenes clips from episodes of shows like Entertainment Tonight, as well as a great-quality version of the full Electronic Presskit, and a few other sources-- and then I reshuffled the clips into more or less the linear order of the movie.

This meant that their original audio, which was mostly voiceover or music, became very jarring fragments of gibberish, so I muted all of that and kept only the usable on-set audio. As a result, it's got a lot of silent shots, but I tried to creatively pepper in a few sounds here and there, just to alleviate the audio void. In a few rare instances, I was even able to take movie dialogue and sync it to their mouth movements.

I always liked the 'fly on the wall' style of the documentary that was done for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. There's no narrator to point out what someone else thinks is important, so the viewer is free to draw their own conclusions. I found such an approach much more immersive and personal, so that was my style choice here, though I did add a couple of text-only notes in the black margin at left and right, anticipating the possible questions of "Why is that not the Ecto-1A?" and "Who's the guy putting slime on Harold?"

I hope you enjoy what I pieced together. There's one shot in here that literally got cut apart into two different featurettes in 1989, and I was able to put the halves back together for the first time in 31 years.

Enjoy! (And Happy Holidays 2020!)



Alex
Last edited by Alex Newborn on December 14th, 2020, 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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By mrmichaelt
#4943337
Alex Newborn wrote: December 13th, 2020, 9:26 pm I recently went through several of the videos in my Summer of '89 playlist on YouTube and collected all the behind-the-scenes clips from episodes of shows like Entertainment Tonight, as well as a great-quality version of the full Electronic Presskit, and a few other sources-- and then I reshuffled the clips into more or less the linear order of the movie.
Excellent work on the super cut, Alex. Great idea to do it along the lines of the chronology of the movie.
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By Alex Newborn
#4943379
Thanks for the kind words everyone.

I also saved this alternate version with all of the various clips reshuffled, but at full volume instead of muted.



I anticipated that I might need this to demonstrate why the finished product opted for silence so often.

It's a pure cacophony of voiceover sentence fragments and snippets of music, but occasionally there were some unanticipated combinations of words that led to funny gibberish. Like "the kind of director who will stop at nothing when it comes to making / slime."

And if you pay close attention, you may notice a few places where the clips were eventually replaced with better footage or recombined in slightly different order in the finished version.

Alex
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By Alex Newborn
#4943395
Dr.D wrote: December 15th, 2020, 5:00 pm Brilliant work Alex. More than anything it's so cool to see the original places where deleted scenes would've played out. This is an absolute gem.
I didn't think when I began this specific project that I would be reconstructing the entire Louis/Janine scene, but it was something I'd tinkered with in the past and already had a rough draft of in another program.

The handful of Rick and Annie shots were all I planned to use for several passes through the footage, but there was that shot of Ivan pointing UP and cueing something. Suddenly it clicked... he was gesturing for Louis to enter at the top of the stairs. That led naturally to the idea of showing the entire scene and peppering in the BTS angles throughout.

In fact, the cutaway to Ivan solved one of the problems of the earlier incarnation of my reconstruction. In the b/w work print (uploaded to Facebook and YouTube some years ago by GB2 crewmember William Forsche) the shot of Janine walking away after saying she was closing up was *slightly* longer. I mean it was just a few extra seconds. Frames, really. Was it going to be jarring to drop in that brief b/w shot in between two color shots?

So in the end, I put the cutaway to Ivan right after the last frame of the movie scene... but I replaced the movie audio with the unscored on-set audio from the work print-- including a couple of extra footsteps of Janine's shoes.

Likewise, the shot of Louis descending the stairs is a hybrid. You might think it's just the deleted scene from the Blu-Ray, but it's not. Some fans did a recut of GB2 and tweaked that footage, and one of the things they added back in was the "Things go better with Coke" sign, which Sony had blurred out because they're not owned by Coke like Columbia was at the time. (It's visible on the b/w workprint, which is how we know what was there.)

I used that for the video portion, but their interpolated cut had the score from the end of Janine's line continuing under Louis' speech as he descended the stairs. Once again, the work print audio came to the rescue.
Also...I'm a sucker for more footage of the gray suits.
Me too, I wish there had been more of them. In fact, I was tempted to run some of those really brief clips in slow-motion to extend them!

Alex
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By Ecto24601
#4943466
Alex, this is brilliant! I had seen the bits of it piece by piece and thought "thank god Ivan cut it like it is in the movie", but seeing it pierced together like that-it works! It's even better-although it's much longer the sum of its parts makes it an even better scene. Thank you for this.
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#4943472
Glad you like it, Ecto24601. (Are you a Les Miz fan?)

I could never figure out the TWO deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray and how they were supposed to fit. Which was first, which was second?

But when I finally started tinkering with it, using the Feb. 1989 script as my sequence, I saw that one of them actually goes in the middle of the other one.

In fact, one piece of business, where the three busters form a wall of packs to keep Hardemeyer from going over to the Mayor and Venkman, is in BOTH of them, so I wound up using the video from the closeup and the audio from the long shot.

Once I made that pivotal choice, everything else fell into place with relative ease.

Alex
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By mrmichaelt
#4943474
Bravo, Alex. I didn't think that version of the scene from the Feb. draft was almost fully filmed aside from a few lines. Maybe it was and footage is somewhere yet unreleased to the wild. I would love it if that Cumbaya part was actually filmed.
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By d_osborn
#4943475
mrmichaelt wrote: December 18th, 2020, 4:44 pm Bravo, Alex. I didn't think that version of the scene from the Feb. draft was almost fully filmed aside from a few lines. Maybe it was and footage is somewhere yet unreleased to the wild. I would love it if that Cumbaya part was actually filmed.
The Nov 27 version of the scene is what was filmed, so the Cumbaya footage is totally out there. :love:
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By mrmichaelt
#4943476
d_osborn wrote: December 18th, 2020, 5:35 pm The Nov 27 version of the scene is what was filmed, so the Cumbaya footage is totally out there. :love:
Ha, had a feeling my wires were crossed after I posted that. Nov 27 draft.

Hopefully that scene shows up in an upcoming documentary...

But man, now I've always been a little conflicted about which comeuppance I like better for Jack.
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By d_osborn
#4943477
mrmichaelt wrote: December 18th, 2020, 5:47 pm But man, now I've always been a little conflicted about which comeuppance I like better for Jack.
I wish they had gone with something a little different than him being sucked in. Maybe something similar to the tentacle arm things that try to grab Ray's boots in Van Horne. Several wrap around him, pulling him into the silme.
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By mrmichaelt
#4943478
d_osborn wrote: December 18th, 2020, 5:58 pm I wish they had gone with something a little different than him being sucked in. Maybe something similar to the tentacle arm things that try to grab Ray's boots in Van Horne. Several wrap around him, pulling him into the silme.
True, probably would have been more palatable than a version of the slime in the bathtub manifestation gumming him and pulling him in.
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By d_osborn
#4943479
mrmichaelt wrote: December 18th, 2020, 6:01 pm
d_osborn wrote: December 18th, 2020, 5:58 pm I wish they had gone with something a little different than him being sucked in. Maybe something similar to the tentacle arm things that try to grab Ray's boots in Van Horne. Several wrap around him, pulling him into the silme.
True, probably would have been more palatable than a version of the slime in the bathtub manifestation gumming him and pulling him in.
HAHAHA! Genius!
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By Dr.D
#4943480
From a character perspective, Jack being fired by Lenny is a way more crushing defeat than being sucked into some slime. Dude is defined by his career as a bureaucrat and is a sycophantic suck-up.

People like that lose their minds when they get fired.
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By mrmichaelt
#4943481
Yeah, maybe it was better that way because it was a different way the bureaucrat was dealt with. If they kept him getting sucked in, could have been too much a similarity to Peck getting nailed with marshmallow residue. This was a real world approach, he got fired for going around his boss' back and got caught red handed. Still could've had the best of both worlds, i.e. at the museum when Peter mentions what happens, Mayor could've had a line - 'you fired after this' and that in could've further fueled his tantrum and pounding the shell himself.
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By Kingpin
#4943488
An additional take that could've been done is that Hardemeyer is so full of himself that even though Lenny fired him, he refuses to accept it. He barges into the meeting between the Ghostbusters and the Mayor outside of the museum, tries to take charge, and gets sucked into the wall for his effort.

However I agree that the slime wall scene is too similar to Peck's comeuppance.
By Alex Newborn
#4943495
I mainly know it from the 10th anniversary concert, but I've seen a touring production and my nephew played Valjean in a surprisingly good college production of it right before he graduated circa 2012. They were one of the first schools to do the full show-- well, more or less; they still couldn't use the counterpoint song that Valjean and Javert sing, which has always been my wife's favorite from the show. I'm partial to Master of the House myself.

As for the number 24601, I've snuck it into a custom action figure before. It was Admiral Ackbar from ROTJ, at the point in the Expanded Universe timeline that he'd been Tarkin's prisoner. I removed the action figure's rank insignia before repainting the clothes, but felt he needed SOMETHING on the chest, so I meticulously painted in those tiny numbers.

If I had it to do over again, mind you, I'd have used an Aurebesh font or something, but this was AGES ago. I was using the POTF2 Ackbar figure.

Alex
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