The Making of "Protector of the Night" By Amy Giaquinto

I've always wanted to try making a claymation film, but for some reason had never had a chance to do it. So after completing the first draft of my feature-length teen comedy, "Meatheads," and teaching myself Avid Xpress Pro (in about a week) so I could put together the promotional film for "Casey's Supercross," I decided I needed to get away from the computer for a while and do something with my hands, something that would enable me to see how my dialogue worked on screen and to make people laugh as I blew off some stress.

Within a few days, I'd procured the materials and started modeling. Soon our apartment was transformed into a working film set. The dining room table was the stage, the laundry drying rack, a table to hold the aluminum adorned living room light, the bar stool, my laptop's desk, a 12 pound weight was the tripod's stabilizer. We couldn't walk through the apartment without tripping over chords, clay, paper bags, construction paper, tools, you name it. But it was well worth the sacrifice because it was a lot of fun to shoot.

Working on ancient technology presented an enormous challenge. My video camera could only shoot 20 still pictures (digital) before I'd have to stop and download them onto my Windows 98 laptop using this program called Picture Gear Lite (which won't run in WindowsXP). It literally took 20-30 minutes to download 20 pictures because the program requires that you open each picture and let it load completely before you can save it. UGH! Talk about tedium.

From there, I put the .tiff files onto a jump drive in batches because the jump drive, the only one compatible with both the Windows 98 and XP laptops, was only 128MB, which is not enough space to store hundreds of image files. Once I'd transferred the images to the XP laptop, I then had to copy each picture and rename it so that picture 1 was now really picture 1 and picture 2, picture 2 was now picture 3 and picture 4. My eyes nearly popped out of my head after doing this for well over 700 images, but it was the quickest way to get duplicate images, so I dealt with it for several hours then went to the gym.

I'm still very, very new to Avid XPress Pro, so it took me a while to figure a few things out, especially how to sync the audio, which was very difficult, especially for this novice. I revised the script, tweaked the video by adding frames here and there, removing frames here and there, etc. until it worked as well as possible. Also, since I'm definitely not an actress, I repeat I am NOT an actress; I wound up spending an exorbitant amount of time re-rerecording lines to make them sound as good as I could. In fact, the only sound I modified in the free wave editor program, Wave Pad, was the spider's laugh. The rest is 100% authentic me.

The other issue I had was that Frankie, Louie, Spider and Hand got a little beat up and needed quite a bit of maintenance as the shoot progressed. Frankie's jaw kept falling off and Spider's head didn't want to stay attached. They were all getting various color clay smudges on them from all of the manipulations. Fortunately, my campy Wal-Mart lighting helps hide those little flaws.

And speaking of lighting, my stars burned out at some point and I didn't notice until they were almost completely dead. Popping a new set of batteries in brightened the lights, but made for a bit of a continuity issue. I would have re-shot everything, but we're talking hours and hours of re-shooting and that just wasn't in the budget.

Not bad for my first claymation film, my second film ever. It's a little rough, but I could spend forever honing it and forever isn't a luxury I've got right now. It just goes to show that you don't need $1 Million to make a movie. It would be nice, but until then (and until I get a heck of a lot more experience, or better yet sell some scripts), $36.59 is pretty hard to beat. When we wrapped, I threw a cast and crew party, but the guests were absolutely dead.