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Episode Two was the most challenging episode to put together but also the most fun.
It all began after brainstorming with a writer friend of mine. I came up with the idea of Fantastica killing herself like the Samurai do when they have been dishonored. Stabbing herself didn’t seem very exciting visually, so I went with jumping to her death. Yeah that would be exciting. One problem…no money.
What I love about low budget filmmaking is it forces you to really get creative about how you’re going to accomplish things.
As I’m pondering how to pull off this fall I come across these photos and thought “Hey! Maybe I can shoot a still sequence and put it together so it looks like she’s falling down the side of the building.”
BEFORE
So first, I had to figure out how I was going to get shots of Fantastica falling. I hooked up with a friend of mine, Mark Paskell, who happens to be a magician. He swore me to secrecy before sharing some magical secrets about how he could make me levitate as we shot the stills. After talking it through we realized it wouldn’t work. We’d loose the effect falling would have on my body and clothing.
Take 2. He called some of his circus friends to see if we could find a trampoline to use. No luck.
Take 3. He called his friend Jeri Kalvan to see if she would let me do the fall in the back of her house where she had an all purpose gym she and her husband built. Jeri is a kickass stunt woman. More on her in part two of behind the scenes.
Jeri’s gym offered me two choices for my fall; a thirteen foot ledge or a five foot ledge. Immediately I lean towards thirteen feet. That isn’t much of a drop. I can do that no problem. Well let me tell you I never even got to the thirteen foot ledge. When I stood on the five foot ledge I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to jump from that! There’s something about falling and the psyche that don’t mesh well.
Now let me preface this with I’ve never done a stunt fall in my life. Jeri quickly realized she couldn’t let me just show up and launch myself from her ledge. I’d probably end up seriously injuring myself. She had me come in the day before we shot and trained me for a couple of hours. We also choreographed how my body would fall through the air so we could capture the different positions during the photo shoot.
AFTER (WE FLIPPED THE IMAGE)
Without Jeri I couldn’t have done it. I was scared to death the entire time. She gave me a sense of safety but still I had to psyche myself up before every fall. I literally kept thinking… “This is it I’m going to die.” Then I’d shake it off…and leap. The next day I felt like I’d been in a really bad car crash. My body ached all over.
I wanted to show you some footage of the photo shoot but due to a technical snafu it pains me to say I lost all the video footage. 
Instead, I’ve put together some of the original still sequences from the shoot so you can have a better idea of what we did. I took these photos, created a mask of Fantastica’s body for each still frame and then picked various building shots Sandra (the D.P.) and I shot to place behind Fantastica. Once I finalized the sequence Justin Herrmann, our amazing visual effects wizard, stepped in and polished it all, making everything match and adding the feel of motion to the sequence.
What I learnt from doing this fall sequence is anything is possible if you put your mind to it.
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[...] and then superimposed these over a shot of a building. You can check out how we did it in this behind the scenes video. Hopefully this will show you that with a little bit of out of the box thinking, you can create [...]