Quick Facts
Release date: July 19th, 2004
Completion date: July 10th, 2004
Starring: Liam Comerford & Michael Connor
Filmed on location in Werrington, Staffordshire in July 2004
Running time: 3 minutes 56 seconds
Time spent in post-production: 1 month
Number of visual effects shots: 26 (All but 3 of the shots!)
About Boxmobiles
The first "big" production that was completed after our first major success Enter The Sandwich, Boxmobiles has very humble beginnings. Inspired in part by dreams he'd had as a child, partly by the work of Sheep Films and BekO , Master Mike created the original Boxmobiles, just for fun, one night in July 2004 with his brother Fish Wizard. It was never intended to be anything more than a bit of fun, but one Inquisitor Liam thought the idea was fantastic and decided that something should be done about it. On an extremely drunken night out in Alton, Staffordshire (where woman-swapping and all sorts of idiotic things occured, but those are anecdotes best saved for another time), the Boxmobiles vision was finalised. A good friend of ours, Matthew Atkins, was having a party just two days later, so once we'd recovered from hangovers we wanted to have something to show at said party.
As always happens with, well, everything, this didn't quite go as planned. We'd given ourselves the task of shooting and editing a 3-minute long effects-heavy short within the space of a few hours. As productive as the Master and the Inquisitor are, all the coffee in the world wasn't going to do it. So the time for the party came, and Liam and Mike decided rather than show an unfinished work, they would instead work on it for a longer period of time.
Over the coming four weeks, Boxmobiles was completed. Because of the small time constraints we had given ourselves, many of the shots didn't turn out as we'd planned, but are still passable. The Boxmobilers themselves were shot against green screen, with (in most cases) green card hanging off the edge of the boxes supported by sticky tape, to hide the legs. In several shots, there was no green screen element at all and the legs of the Boxmobilers were removed via a simple animated masking technique. Boxmobiles was the first taste that Inquisitor Liam had of Adobe After Effects - valuable experience he'd need for The Forest just a few months later.
The idea of using Chariot of Fire as the ending music had existed since the start, since it was so wonderfully clichéd as to be perfect. The sounds of the Boxmobiles themseles, is a simple garder strimmer recorded with a basic microphone in Inquisitor Liam's bedroom. Liam found that by layering several sound effects together which had a common intention, you could create something quite respectable, even with basic resources.
It's all about resourcefulness. Boxmobiles proves that. |
