Reginald Smith - The Cookie Meltdown
Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown After years in incubation, two long weekends of shooting, and lots of hours working around iMovie bugs, my directorial debut is complete! Of course, it wouldn’t be anything without the help and support of many, many fine folks in the real world and on the Internet, so be sure to check out the full credits below.
“Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown” is a comedy-farce about secret agent Reginald Smith and the work he performs in the name of The Good Guys to thwart the nefarious plans of criminal mastermind Nikolao Marco. It was shot on MiniDV using a single Canon Optura 20, and some of the shots used the $14 steadycam that I built a while back. The movie also features 3d animation for creating props, titles, and transitions.
You can watch “Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown” by clicking the link below, but I highly recommend that you right- or Control-click the link and save the movie to disk. It’s a 15 MB file, so if you’re on dialup, it’ll take a while to download.
Download “Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown”
The file is a QuickTime movie encoded with the 3vix D4 MPEG-4 video codec and the Apple AAC audio codec. It plays great in VLC, and you can (naturally) play it back in QuickTime Player as well.
Credits (in order of appearance)
John Bintz as Reginald Smith
Sam Kelly as Dr. Agent Percy Sidney DDS Esquire XVI, Master Chef
Tim Daniels as Dirk Taffy
Alex Fazenbaker as Henchman
Written by John Bintz and Alex Fazenbaker
Videography by Salika Nammavong, Tim Daniels, Alex Fazenbaker, John Bintz, and Sam Kelly
Editing and Sound Design by John Bintz and Tim Daniels
Storyboard by John Bintz
Directed and Produced by John Bintz
Music
- “Dropping Out Of School” by Brad Sucks http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2003/10/30/dropping-out-of-school/
- All Other Compositions by Gavin Brown http://homepage.mac.com/gavbrown/
Photography
- “Morning over Madison” by Todd Klassy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/latitudes/25712817/
At the time of use, this image was distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (see “What if I change my mind?” in the CC FAQ) and the Attribution requirement of this license has been fulfilled to the best of my ability.
- “rome at dusk” by antmoose
- Other Production Photos by Salika Nammavong and Alex Fazenbaker
Sound Effects
- “f18flyby.wav” by F7 Sound and Vision http://www.f7sound.com/snd.htm
- “Modem#1.11.wav” by schluppipuppie
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=8015
Description: I recorded the dial process of the modem in my powerbook. Then I cutted the whole thing and this is one piece. Nice to use in a sampler and and play around with the pitch wheel.
- “RBH_Household_phone ring.wav” by RHumphries
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=1032
Description: telephone ring with a real bell. Stereo Recording, Recorded with a Zaxcom Deva II, and Sennheiser MKH 30 and MKH 40 as mid-side, decoded to AB stereo.
- “RBH_Household_glass clink.wav” by RHumphries
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=1021
Description: two wine glasses toasting, clink together. Stereo Recording, Recorded with a Zaxcom Deva II, and Sennheiser MKH 30 and MKH 40 as mid-side, decoded to AB stereo.
- Other sound effects by John Bintz and Tim Daniels
Software and Hardware Used
- Audacity
- Blender
- The GIMP
- Inkscape
- Adobe Photoshop
- Apple GarageBand
- Apple iMovie
- Macromedia Flash
- Toon Boom Studio
- Canon Optura 20
- Canon PowerShot S1 IS
- Apple Powerbook 15” 1 GHz G4
- Home-built AMD Athlon XP 1.5 GHz
A very special thanks to Robin for the heavy-duty old school tripod.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.