Andrew Von Lawrence Presents: Troels the Existential Dinosaur

A wild idea appeared!:

I do not watch a lot of cartoons or animated shows/movies anymore, but for some random reason, I recently wanted to try and make one myself. As with most ideas, the inspiration behind this one kind of came out of the blue, and as ever, the story ended up being completely different from what I had initially intended. This probably is the quote on quote "best" skit I have made to date though, seeing as I ended up investing way more time into making it than any other project so far. I just pray that putting a piece of copyrighted Hans Zimmer music in it will not motivate the NSA have to me executed or something. 

Andrew used editing!:

My guess would be that this 5 minute video took about 15 hours to create, the biggest time consumer by far being the editing process. For some reason it did not occur to me that taking still pictures would be the easiest way to go about making a stop motion cartoon such as this one, and as such, I ended up having around five hundred small clips that all had to be trimmed down and matched together. Even though this particular video only runs at four frames per second, creating just under a thousand 0,25 second clips was a major pain. 

It's not very effective...:

Apart from switching to still pictures, the next cartoon I make will be shot on a desk or a chair or something, and not on my goddamn bedroom floor. After three hours of sitting on the carpet rotating small paper stars and moving badly drawn dinosaur carcasses half a centimeter per frame, my spine and my ass were basically ready for amputation. It was hilarious. Seriously though, I did have a good time making this video, and stop motion is definitely a technique I will be working with again in the future. 

You can find this video as well as a few others on my Youtube channel.

Andrew Von Lawrence Presents: Benjamin har en drøm

A bunch of firsts:

"Benjamin har en drøm", or "Benjamin Has a Dream" in English, is a small skit I made with a friend of mine a couple of months ago. It was my first time working with "actors" on a "set" as well, so in a way, the filming of this video was my first outing as a "real" film director. The skit itself turned out to be pretty awful, which didn't come as a surprise to either me or Lasse, who is the friend I made it with. I didn't really care about the quality of the skit as much as practicing the process of writing, preparing, shooting and editing a scene, and even though it turned out to be a much lengthier process than I'd though, the challenge of making it all come together was very fun and rewarding in the end. 

You can find this video as well as a few others on my Youtube channel.

Andrew Von Lawrence Presents: An Inner Fruit Salad

A fruit salad buried deep within:

You see kids, this is what happens when you watch too many Terrence Malick movies. All that mumbly existential voiceover you heard while watching The Thin Red Line? It has forever changed your way of thinking about war stories and film in general, and you will probably have to go through a pseudo-philosophic period in your own filmmaking process, in order to "exercise" the Malick-demons from your brain. The last shot in this video specifically shows how one should go about separating flesh and consciousness from each other, creating an infinite loop in time and space, allowing you to see past the materialistic and superficial standards of postmodern society. This ability will come in very handy when trying to differentiate between right and wrong in tough ethical dilemmas, because if the passing of time has taught us anything, it is that nothing is so bad that it is not good for anything. Barf!

T. Malick and his teachings: 

All joking aside though, I threw this small video together in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, strictly because I wanted to try out my new voice recording software (The program is called Audacity, in case you are interested). As you probably have guessed already, I have been watching a lot of Terrence Malick films as of late (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line), and having been very impressed by almost all of them, it felt very natural to try and rip off some of his narration techniques. I really dig the way in which he combines his poetic visual style with good old fashioned storytelling, and even though this is more apparent in his earlier work than in films such as The Tree of Life and To the Wonder, I still feel that these films can teach me a lot about visual storytelling and narrative structure as a whole. 

You can find this video as well as a few others on my Youtube channel.

Andrew Von Lawrence Presents: Fruit Salad

Chop chop:

In a way, this is my first video to be made on an actual budget (about 8$ was spent on strawberries, kiwis and bananas). The title of the vid kind of says it all, but in case you are curious, it does in fact not contain some sort of deeper meaning or rich and important message. I say this because when I revealed the title of the skit to my 16-year-old sister, she philosophically asked me whether we are dealing with an "inner" fruit salad or just a plain old literal one. I unfortunately had to inform her that this particular salad was quite straight forward and unambiguous in its development and characteristics, but who knows, maybe I will get around to making a more David Lynchian version some time down the road.

Behind the scenes:

In order to make this video work, I needed to have both my hands available and ready to grab, squeeze and move different types of fruit and kitchen equipment at all times. Since I do not own a tripod and had no idea that my stepdad had an old one lying around at the time of shooting, this meant that I had to come up with some kind of homemade installation in order to position my camera in the angle that I needed. Suspending my brand new 550$ camera off of a kitchen roll-holder which was tied to small chair positioned on an upside down basket on top of my kitchen table ended being the solution that I went with, and as you can see in the video, it ended up working out perfectly well. I do not know why I did not take any pictures of this spectacular contraption, but rest assured that it was quite a wonder to behold. 

Changing editing software:

I initially started editing this skit in iMovie, but in the same way that it happened with my first video Mokaface, it did not take long before something stupid took place. Half way though the painfully long and repetitive process of cutting together all the short clips of me shredding different types of fruit into small pieces, iMovie suddenly decided to crash. Thankfully the footage did not disappear entirely this time around like it did with Mokaface, although all the editing I had done up to that point sadly did. iMovie then kept on crashing every time I tried to reopen the program, and after a few minutes of trying, I uninstalled the program and decided to try out Final Cut Pro instead. This program turned out to be much more professional and easy to handle than iMovie ever was, and re-editing the video only ended up taking about two hours, which is just about as much time as I had already spent editing in iMovie. Having to start all over again obviously sucked, but transitioning to Final Cut Pro and discovering how much better that program is almost makes up for it. 

You can find this video as well as a few others on my Youtube channel.

Andrew Von Lawrence Presents: Mokaface

The synopsis:

So this is the very first video that I made with my new camera setup, so naturally, it is absolutely terrible. Making it was quite entertaining though, and I already feel much more comfortable with a camera between my hands than I did just 24 hours ago. The video in itself showcases the dramatic after-school routine of a 19-year-old cinephile, and it deals with classic movie themes such as indecisiveness, addiction, laziness and dreadful singing voices. 

The "production": 

Being the movie-making beginner that I am, I started off the editing process by accidentally deleting all of my footage, which meant that I had to shoot the entire thing all over again. The fact that it only took me about 60 minutes to do so made this slight bump in the road more of an inconvenience than a full fleshed disaster, and a lot of the shots ended up coming out far better during the second round of shooting than they did during the first. I guess this is pretty natural given how little experience I still have, so in a way, having all my clips disappear sort of was a blessing in disguise. As far as I can see, the shadow of my microphone is only visible once or twice during the whole 2-3 minutes of the video, which is pretty damn good if I have to say so myself!

You can find this video as well as a few others on my Youtube channel.