Making the video...

I thought I'd explain a little bit about how went about making my video for the careerbuilder.com Disney Dream Job contest. If you have no interest in knowing how I made it... that's ok, feel free to skip this post -- I won't be offended.

The video was shot in two sessions of about 35 minutes each over two days. The first session consisted of the scenes with me at the front of the class room. Shooting was done with a Sony Hi-8 Digital Camcorder set upon a tripod. Each scene was shot twice so that the best take of each could be used. There was some concern that the audio level was too low so I made an attempt to speak louder in the second take.

Ambient room lighting (florescent) was used (although I toyed with the idea of supplementing it with additional lights).

I had originally intended to write the intro text onto the white board, but the marker didn’t really appear well on the video. I was able to get it to be visible by writing thicker, but this wouldn’t lend itself to the appearance of casual writing on the board. So, I switched instead to showing static text.

All the editing was done using Windows XP Movie Maker. The video was transferred via firewire to my PC in the highest quality digital mode. Transitions between scenes were easily added. The trickiest scene was the ghost class. This involved overlaying an image of the empty classroom over the video of the class. Movie Maker doesn’t natively support this, but you can trick it into doing so by creating a title overlay with blank text and a PNG image with a certain level of transparency. I took a snap within Movie Maker of the empty classroom and used this to generate the PNG image with about 50% transparency.

The final scene where I vanish into thin air was a simple matter of using the dissolve transition from the scene with me in it to the empty scene. I used a still image (again captured in Movie Maker) rather than a video so that I could have better control over the duration.

Finally I faded the video to black. This had to be done quickly but I wanted to include it as I know that YouTube has a tendency to clip the final second or so.

Once I had all the scenes in place, I needed to do some tweaking to get the total running time down to 45 seconds. This was more difficult that I expected and in the end I had to shorten the intro text to a shorter time than I would have liked (I think the impact of the text is lost a bit).

The audio of the video was processed separately by first recording the camcorder audio from my scenes at the front of the classroom along with the one scene where the class is visible. I used Cool Edit 2000 to capture the audio as it played in Movie Maker. I then spent a little time boosting it and removing the camera noise (using a neat feature in Cool Edit that allows creating filters from sound samples). Next, I added in the audio from the class (when they aren’t on screen). And then I recorded the final moan (the original was pretty wimpy) which I put through a reverb filter.

I now had the complete audio for the video which I used to replace the original audio in Movie Maker. I had to experiment a bit to get it synchronized with the video and I never did get it perfect, but it was close enough.

My entry into the contest...

I’m not sure exactly when I first heard about the careerbuilder.com dream job contest. Perhaps it was on Ricky Birgante’s Inside the Magic Podcast. But I first seriously considered it after hearing it on the official Disneyland podcast. The contest solicited entries to become a Disney cast member for a day. There were five categories: Pirate, Parade Performer, Princess, Jungle Cruise Skipper and Haunted Mansion Butler/Maid.

I’ve always loved the Haunted Mansion. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the special effects used there. Anyone that knows me knows that I love Halloween and that I love building automated props to scare and entertain people. So the opportunity to peek behind the scenes at the Haunted Mansion was too good to pass up. Now, I’ll admit that an entry level position working as a cast member isn’t completely my idea of a dream job. My true dream job would be as a member of the team of Imagineers – designing new attractions for the theme parks. But that wasn’t being offered. So I’ll have to settle for the next best thing.

The contest required entrants to produce a 45 second video that explains why they are qualified for and/or want their dream job. I’ve put together a few family videos in the past, so I found this aspect of the contest interesting. My first inclination was to put together a spooky Night Gallery/Hitchcock style monologue that would be appropriate for a role in the Haunted Mansion. But then I thought that it would be better to tell some kind of story within the 45 seconds. I wanted to focus on creating an entertaining scenario that would play out in the short time period. I know that most Disney attractions start out with a back story and that’s how I would approach my video.

The idea I came up with was to present myself as a ghost instructor teaching a class of the newly departed in the hopes that they could take on the role of the 1000^th ghost in the Haunted Mansion. I thought about the story at night while trying to fall asleep and the next day I wrote up a screen play version of what I had in mind (you can read the original script if you wish).

At this point, I didn’t discuss the contest with anyone. I enjoyed the exercise of writing the screen play and I thought it was half way decent. But I knew that unless I got support from others, the idea would remain just that. So I decided to share my idea with my wife, Laura. I figured that if she thought the idea was good, she would push me to carry through and actually make the video a reality. When I read her the script, her reaction was positive and as I had hoped, she encouraged me to do it. Then she asked how far off the deadline was… a little less than two weeks.