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over the course of three days in the summer, the idea for
“12 Hot Women” came about when director Alan
Chan was having lunch with a colleague. “We were railing
on all those short films on the Internet - laughing about
how they were all artsy and pretentious, pretending to carry
some deep philosophical message,” Alan said. “
Finally I said ‘You know, if I put TWELVE HOT WOMEN
in a movie, I wouldn’t need a plot!”
And so the idea came to be. In the
course of the next few months, the idea became a running
joke at lunches and barbeques – friends and colleagues
started joking about it, and the one-liners and punchlines
started coming fast and furious. After a barrage of input,
Alan decided he needed to “exorcise” the idea
from his head - and started to sketch storyboards about
a cadre of supersecret female agents working for a covert
government agency called Omega Omega. These storyboards
were then edited together on a Sony VAIO computer system
running Adobe’s Premiere editing software. A rough
voiceover, temp music and sound effects were added to create
the initial “animatic” edit.
The animatic received great responses
from those who saw it (a fellow vfx artist who saw it got
so excited he started to make up an entire plot for the
“plotless” movie), so much so that Alan started
to entertain the thought of actually producing the trailer.
A copy of the animatic edit made its way from California
to Dallas, Texas, where Spirit 10 producer Breanna Jarvis
got to see it. “I laughed my head off!” Breanna
says, “it was so incredibly off the wall - so badass!
I called Alan and told him we had to shoot this.”
Breanna then turned around and showed co-founders and producers
Jeff Howard and Jason Bagley the animatic edit as well.
“Convincing them wasn’t hard, because the animatic
practically sells itself.”
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Production:
 With
his co-conspirators onboard, Alan, Jeff, Breanna and Jason
set to work sorting out the logistics of the production. With
a small production budget of $5000, Breanna juggled the tasks
of securing locations, props (enough guns and bazookas to
outfit a Navy SEAL team), casting and costuming. “Because
the short is in the form of a trailer, we ended up with a
lot more locations than a typical short. Within the duration
of the short itself, there are probably some 15 different
scenes and location changes spread out over three minutes.
In addition to this, we had to manage the shooting schedules
of twelve hot working actresses and models. That’s a
lot of logistics.”
 Production
commenced in late July in Dallas, kicking off with a swimsuit
photo shoot. “We knew we would need publicity shots,”
Jason says, “and we wanted additional material for the
website for the fans, so Alan said, ‘why don’t
we do a photo shoot as well?’” Photographer Dan
Katzenberger was brought on board, and the result is over
a thousand swimsuit glamour photographs, which will be released
over the course of time.  “Our
production schedule was hectic,” said Jeff. “Because
we were on a small budget, we could only afford to rent
the HD camera and equipment for a few days - and even then
it was a significant portion of our budget. We were literally
running all over the Dallas metropolitan area in order to
get all the shots we needed to get. I think when you watch
the trailer, you’d find it hard to believe we shot
all those different locations and setups in two and a half
days. Through it all, the girls were great – they
were all professional and awesome to work with.”
 “It’s
interesting to note,” says Alan, “that although
the short is a spoof of the sexploitation in movies, that
none of the actresses in the movie felt exploited. In fact,
I think it actually empowered them to be running around
with guns kicking butt.” It was such a pleasure having
12 hot women onset, Alan says, “that I want to go
make the actual movie of the trailer just to hang out with
the Omega Agents once more!”
“We had a great crew,”
says Breanna. “Clay Liford and Trent DiGuiglio alternated
DP (Director of Photography) positions, with Lindsey Perry
working sound and occasionally as First Assistant Camera.
The support crew included Janet Harris, who did great makeup
jobs on the women, and Toby Thomas, the “gunmeister”,
who supplied a literal arsenal of prop pistols, machineguns,
rifles and even bazookas. Dan Katzenberger, our onset photographer,
documented everything as well as photographing the swimsuit
photo shoot.”
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Post-Production:
After wrapping principal photography,
Alan returned to Los Angeles where the raw HD (High Definition)
master footage was dubbed down to DVCAM tape format for
offline editing. The footage was logged and digitized onto
the same Sony system that was used to edit the animatic,
and shot by shot, the animatic storyboards were replaced
by actual footage.
Meanwhile, back in Dallas, music composers Chris Gill and
Steve Zube were hard at work composing original music for
the short. “Alan specifically wanted a big metal-rock
influence, timed to the edit,” says Chris. “So
we built this over-the-top track with guitar riffs all over
the place. It worked great with the edit.”
As all this was happening,
Eki Halkka sat halfway around the world in Helsinki, Finland
creating the 3D computer generated imagery (CGI) effects
that would flesh out and expand the scope of the project.
“Because of the limited budget,” Eki elaborated,
“It was not possible for Alan to physically shoot
the massive wide shot of the Omega Omega Headquarters Atrium.
So we simply replicated Alan’s vision in CGI, and
added the girls in as digital doubles.”
Some shots even required Eki to
perform ‘breast jiggle enhancements’. “Alan
had this shot where we were supposed to see one of the agents
in a Jeep, and her breasts were supposed to bounce up and
down. Because of the muscularly endowed nature of the actress,
Alan could not get the amount of bounce that he wanted,
so we simply went in and used Adobe After Effects’
warp mesh tool to exaggerate the bounce. Alan fell out of
his chair laughing when we showed him the first tests of
the shot.” |
 Upon
completion of the rough edit, Alan approached Creofilm CG
Supervisor Andy Lesniak for technical assistance. “The
plan was always to offline edit the movie at TV resolution,”
says Alan, “and when we were happy with the edit, go
back to the HD master tapes and essentially replace the tv
resolution frames with the high resolution frames - much like
we replaced the storyboards with the tv res frames.”
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 “Hi-Def
is the postproduction solution of the future,” says
Andy, “and Post Logic/Creofilm is one of the few post
houses in Los Angeles that has two fully-integrated HD Inferno
bays - one at its Hollywood location and another at its Santa
Monica location”. Using the HD Inferno bays, Andy used
an Edit Decision List to cull the shots from the HD master
tape, delivering nearly 10 gigabytes of image data to Alan
at HD resolution.
Returning to his editing system, Alan conformed the HD frames
to the edit, adding the finished CGI effects and completed
audio post as well as performing final color-timing on the
edit. The completed edit was then exported back to Post Logic
as a sequence of images and an audio track for mastering onto
an HDCAM master.
“It’s an all-digital
pipeline,” says Alan. “From concept to execution
to post, we’re utilizing digital tools to master and
shape our vision within a limited budget. That fact alone
made it possible for us to turn what started off as a lunchtime
conversation joke into the epic masterpiece you see before
you.” |
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