Archive for category 2011 Production Log

Saturday, April 30, 2011 (3 hours)

Today I did some actual work on my Jeep, which was putting together my newly-painted windshield frame in preparation for getting some glass for it.  I’m not counting that, however.  The big accomplishment today was completing the flux capacitor.  The chaser LED Christmas lights I ordered from Hong Kong for $1 finally arrived (these are about $30 if you buy them here), so I started working on the three tubes of light that animate towards the center of the flux capacitor. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday, April 22 through Sunday, April 24 – (15 hours)

Got LOTS of stuff done this weekend.  On Friday I shopped for the raw materials I would need for doing the “time machine conversion” on my Jeep.  On Saturday and Sunday I painted parts, worked on the flux capacitor and bent up the electrical conduit for the “conductor” (for lack of a better term… it’s the material that follows the contour of the rear of the vehicle; it lights up when the time circuits are activated).  It was quite a job bending the pipe and getting the two pipes to contour the same line. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 – 2 hours

I borrowed a little time from work today to work on “the time circuits”… some old camera control panels that look techy enough to be the controls for a time machine.  The panels are from a studio camera from the mid-1970’s and would allow a camera “shader” (someone who manually matches multiple cameras to each other) to adjust the exposure, color balance and other parameters of the camera’s image from a remote position.  The camera is long gone but I kept the control panel because it looked cool. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday, April 16, 2011 (3 hours)

Today I worked on the script for a few hours; I got the first scene done, up until the first music video.  I found a transcript of the original movie online that will help with writing the dialogue while keeping it faithful to the original movie.  I also started ripping the movie from a DVD to a file so that I can use it while editing as well as scan through it for a reference.  I also plan on creating a storyboard with screenshots from the original film to aid in shooting. Read the rest of this entry »

4-15-11 (2 hours)

Spent a couple hours today researching and ordering materials for the movie online.  Among the items: parts for a flux capacitor, Tyvek hazmat suits for Marty and Doc, and some rope LED’s for the Jeep time machine conversion.  When Carrie and I were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee last summer we visited a Cars of the Stars museum and I took quite a few pictures of a genuine Back To The Future DeLorean, so I got those out to see what I would need to do a reasonably convincing look.  See my photos below… I was limited to staying behind the ropes and the car was essentially sitting in a bay window, so the photos are not the best. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get into the first production log entry, I’ll give you a little background.

“Back To The Future” was a great idea from the get-go, but the complexity kept scaring us away.  The first time we talked about the idea was in the spring of 2006, on the heels of our first movie-based parody, The Offroad Warrior.   Read the rest of this entry »