Watch and rejoice! Show your friends! I’m promoting the ever-loving crap out of this thing. It truly is one of my greatest endeavors as an artist, one of my ultimate creations, and I am really quite proud of it.

So, looking back at all the work that went into this thing, I’ve decided to do a little post-mortem, to give you some information and a look into how I created it.

IN THE BEGINNING:
Everything starts with an idea. Black Hole Ghost is the combination of two separate ideas from my first year of college, 3 years ago. I had just finished a lousy stop-motion thing called Godzilla Vs the Zoids, which was clearly just an excuse to set a couple model houses on fire. But doing stop-motion for the first time inspired me, and I started thinking of doing another project, one with live actors, in black and white. My favorite film (which I just finished writing a paper on) is Pi, and so that served as my basic framework and influence. I wanted to do a story about a hacker who gets in over her head and starts being attacked by ghosts. That was literally it, I never really tried expanding upon it.

It never happened, obviously.

A little while later, I got a new idea. I wanted to do a sort of photography project, pictures with journal entries, about a girl who starts dreaming about her doppelganger and so decides to hunt it down to kill it before it finds and kills her. Nothing too outrageous.

The only link between these two projects was that I wanted Sierra, who plays Gemini and her Ghost in BHG, involved. She IS a Gemini, oddly enough.

PRE-PRODUCTION:
Fast-forward to this semester, I’m in a class called Film & Animation, and we have to do a solo project and/or an animation. Either just a short animation to stick into a live-action production, or an entire animated short. I went digging through old notes and found the stuff I had scribbled down for those two ideas, and somehow came to merge them into one thing after asking, “what if you see your own ghost?” Writing the screenplay took very little time, especially after my friend Shannon pulled me out of a mental block by pointing out to me that the answer I needed was already right there in the script, as well as citing Pi. I kept it simple, deciding to go the silent film route not only to give it another unique layer, but also because I had no clue how to record dialogue that didn’t sound crappy and unprofessional, as well as knowing that trying to sync audio would be difficult. I kept the entire thing in one location, my apartment, for ease of shooting. I finished it up, got in touch with Sierra, worked out the storyboards, and that was all there was to it.

SHOOTING:
Using my roommate’s camera made everything so easy, almost criminally simple. I spent an afternoon shooting Sierra in the apartment, learning the ins and outs of the camera as well as settling into a groove in working with her. We got quite a bit done, but the footage had to be tossed because Sierra cut her bangs, and the inconsistency would’ve been way too blatant. I also realized that I had shot her in one shirt towards the end, and in the next scene after passing out, she was supposed to be in a different shirt. Rather than reshoot the scene using the proper shirt like any reasonable man would do, I just wrote an entirely different scene, the one in which she undresses, takes a bath, then puts on the right shirt before encountering her Ghost. This worked beautifully, because I love how she looks at herself in the mirror wearily RIGHT BEFORE seeing her Ghost. It also lengthened the film a little bit, as I was afraid it would come out too short. We wrapped up shooting EVERYTHING involving Sierra in a mere two days of work. Shots of the ghosts were done later, and in one case, the screaming face towards the end, I just had my friend AJ send me a couple photos of himself screaming. Convenient, considering the man lives in Texas, yes?  I played the ghost in the bathtub because I knew of no one else willing to strip down to their boxers and sit in a half-full bathtub. Believe me, it was uncomfortable. I suffer for my art, you see.

POST-PRODUCTION:
This is where the bulk of my time was spent in and out of class. First off, the entire thing was shot in color, so I had to take over 1800 images and convert them to black and white in batches of 200 or so using Photoshop’s Automate function. I also spent a lot of time tweaking the brightness and contrast values in smaller batches, again, wanting this to look similar to the way Pi did. I could’ve just loaded it all into iMovie and convert it to black and white at once, but I wouldn’t have been able to play with the contrast and such the way I wanted to.
Then came working on the ghosts. Every ghost has a horizontal static filter laid over them in Photoshop, and in 90% of the shots, the actors had to be cut from their images and pasted into shots with Sierra in them, except for the times I forgot to shoot a background. For instance, in her first appearance, the Ghost is sitting in the office chair and is completely solid until she gets up. Never using a tripod made things difficult, too. I learned quickly to love the Quick Mask mode, though I was pretty sloppy. I wanted it to look primitive, and it shows with some places where I either didn’t cut close enough or cut too close to the ghosts. All that static, and the transparency flickering in and out for all but a few shots of Sierra as the Ghost and the shots of me in the bathtub kind of cover those ragged bits up though. Still, it was time consuming, editing the ghosts into shots one frame at a time. Having them flicker on and off screen was both for convenience (less work to do) and as a nice, creepy effect.

EDITING:
Getting all the shots in proper order was a pain, but getting it at the right speed was moreso. iMovie refused to set the individual frames at the speed I wanted them to be, so I had to settle for everything moving at a Speedy Gonzalez pace first. I edited it in batches of 200-300 images, saved them as individual video files, then loaded them back into iMovie, where I stitched them all together, then isolated segments and slowed them down manually. I had help from Ryan, one of the ghosts, in determining the amount of time the title cards should stay up on screen in order to be read clearly and without really rushing it. It is a bit too wordy in some places, but I was afraid that if I didn’t explain much of what was going on, none of it would make sense. Finally, I worked on getting the proper aged film effect going. Still a bit too staticky, but it still looks good.

MUSIC:
Arg. I decided to do the music myself, because I am a masochist. I knew literally nothing about Garage Band, the program on the Macs in the computer lab, and while I can play guitar and bass, I have no understanding of playing a keyboard and only a rough intuitive idea of what sounds good and what doesn‘t. And yet I did not let that stop me. A number of the tracks feel shoehorned in, but I think that also adds to the feeling that this is like a “rediscovered” silent film. The visuals are rather choppy, so why not make the audio a bit choppy too? I really just picked from all kinds of synthesizer options with names like Constellation, Ominous Dancefloor, and Metropolis (which is coincidentally a masterpiece silent sci fi film from the twenties!) and just pressed one or two keys at a time. The ominous, ambient intro? Me pressing down on one key, holding it the entire time, then pressing on the key next to it for a short while. Seeing as how he had four separate appearances, I did a little 4-note thing for the Man in Black and decided to stick to those four notes to do variations of for his subsequent appearances, sort of like a theme. Except his second appearance, which is only 3 of those notes because I’m an idiot. Oh well. Each track was only one or two layers of sound. I just wanted creepy, artificial, ethereal stuff, very much like the soundtracks to the Metroid videogames and Clint Mansell‘s score for Pi, and I think I succeeded.

AFTERTHOUGHTS:
I still feel weird about the title. I also don’t know if the “voice” of the title cards really matches with Sierra’s performance, probably because I only hear it in my voice because I was the one who wrote it all. Maybe I could’ve gotten Sierra to help out with that, but I was asking enough of her as it was and didn’t have that much time anyway. You know, apart from it being a requirement, animating the ghosts themselves, and the uncomfortable, jerky effect it has, there was no real reason for this to be stop-motion animated. It was just how I always envisioned the thing. Some shots are still too brief for my tastes and I wish I could‘ve shot a little bit more to give it a little bit more length. The pacing feels a bit too quick. You can tell in the close-up of her typing that the laptop is still just on the desktop, but she really is typing something specific which I TOLD her to type, not just random stuff. There are other inconsistencies, too, like a bracelet she had.
If I were doing it as a comic drawn myself, the Ghost would’ve been fully nude, to further emphasize the fact that she is the id to Gemini‘s ego, completely open and unrestrained, hiding nothing. The bathtub ghost probably would have been too, because I am an equal opportunist when it comes to nudity in art. Nevertheless, I think Sierra did a fantastic job in portraying Gemini and the Ghost, and I feel we really succeeded in contrasting the quiet, weary hacker and her wilder, more emotional and animated ghost. I’m still not sure why I insisted on Gemini never removing her goggles (even in the bathtub), what importance they were to her, aside from how they looked cool and further contrasted her with the Ghost. I guess the meaning of those goggles is just something for viewers to speculate about. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

It was time-consuming, painful work, but I’m proud of what I’ve made and would love to do something similar again…just uh, not any time soon…

[Brett]