2001: A FLAT ODYSSEY
The final leg of our LAST EXIT TO NOWHERE (LETN) trilogy was to exhibit part of their magnet collection. The question was how do we make something 2-dimensional visually interesting? Luckily, LETN had a magnet that would do all the heavy lifting for us. We instantly fell in love with their HAL eye magnet from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY because it looked three-dimensional, and we knew we could come up with a gag for it.
No longer available as a magnet, you can still purchase as a sticker.
The idea was pretty simple: we shoot a closeup of the HAL eye, with a parody of the dialog from the movie playing over it; Dave asking Hal to open the door. We hold on the eye as long as possible, and then cut wide to reveal that we’re in an office kitchen, and Hal has locked the communal fridge because his coworkers keep eating his food. This was an opportunity to display several of the other magnets also available for LETN. All we needed was a silver fridge, those are pretty common, right?
We put a blast out on social media, but no one had what we were looking for. How was it possible no-one we knew owned a silver fridge?? This is another one of those instances where I know I’ve seen the perfect prop frequently in my life, and then the instant I need it for a shoot, it suddenly ceases to exist.
Weeks went by, and we couldn’t find our perfect fridge. Were we going to have to try and convince an appliance store to let us shoot in their shop? That’s never a fun pitch. Then we were at a party at our great friend and collaborator Matt Dy’s house. I went to get a beer from the fridge (a fridge that I’ve grabbed a dozen beers from), and lo and behold… it’s silver. We had our location.
I wanted the color scheme of our co-workers to reflect the color scheme of the characters in 2001, so I found a yellow button down for Hal, and then dressed Dave in my trusty orange down sweater which has a slight spacesuit quality to it.
We created some flyers to stick to the fridge, all of which were spins on other LETN magnets, for example:
We arrived at Matt’s to shoot, it was going to be pretty simple. An extreme close up of the HAL eye and then pop out to a wide to reveal the co-workers, and punch in to split the difference for a final product shot which included the LETN sticker with the web address. But like all shoots, there was something we hadn’t anticipated when we went to place the HAL Magnet…
Turns out the silver fridge was aluminum, not steel, and magnets don’t adhere to aluminum. Ugh – science be damned! But no shoot is complete without its trusty art kit, so we grabbed some double sided tape and attached Hal. When we went to attach the other four magnets, two of them had wandered off.
We spent about 10 minutes looking for them, then finally I said “I know we’re going to find them the instant we’re done,” and we decided it would be just as easy to place them into the shot in post since they were flat.
Lighting was the biggest challenge since we had generic office lighting and our talent standing next to what is basically a wall, but still wanted to give them enough texture and shading. I ended up hanging a tube light above them, blocked the spill from hitting the fridge, and then a bounce card below. That was it.
This shot was the inspiration for our magnet commercial.
Thinking like Kubrick (simple, right?), we wanted symmetry, so for each of our shots we used the camera’s crosshairs to place the HAL eye dead center of frame, so that when we cut in and out, the eye would never blink, so to speak.
We shot the piece a few times trying to get the body language down, knowing that once again we’d be replacing the voice in post. As we wrapped out, we found our missing magnets stuck together, attached to a piece of steel film equipment; told you so.
Post was tricky in that the question was how long can we hang on the ECU of HAL. Cut away too soon and we have nowhere else to go, but hang on too long, and we risk losing the audience’s interest. We played with a few variations, until finally settling on what you see in the end.
The other issue was that the fridge had some old streaks on it that we weren’t able to scrub off, so we needed to reshoot the HAL eye. I went down to the local hardware store and found a clean piece of steel, then replicated the lighting scenario from the set, and we replaced it in the timeline.
Next I took some photos of our wayward magnets, brought them into our edit system, scaled them down, rotated them, brought down the contrast to match the other magnets, placed them in the frame, and set a matte line around them when Hal turns to leave.
For audio, Danny and I once again read both parts, and being that he’s more robotic and lacks empathy, he was a natural for Hal.
The irony is that of our three spots for LETN, this one is the least dynamic of them all, kinda flat… like a magnet but we still think it works conceptually.