Why is Janine so angry today? Maybe it’s because the Ghostbusters have had her employed for over 30 years, haven’t given her a raise, and *now *they expect her to work from home because the secretaries from international franchises haven’t been properly trained…
Anyway, here’s a little project that’s been floating around in my brain for a few months now. I decided not to wear a screen-accurate outfit because Janine has more than one pair of clothes! I hope you enjoy it. Sorry about most of the shots not being properly framed, by the way. This was a one-woman job (except for the last scene), so I’ll make a mental note to frame things better if I do more shorts like this one!
She had one in an episode of RGB, when her apartment was haunted. That was a fun scene to shoot because normally, I don’t bathe whilst wearing a swimsuit (which of course you can’t see).
Thank you! I do hope to make another short with Janine in the future.
Great concept, great script, and great performance.
The editing/pacing could be a little quicker for my tastes, but that’s something that will probably develop as you do more of these self-shot and self-edited videos.
Time feels totally different in front of the camera than it does when you’re watching it played back. Once you gain more experience editing yourself, your on-camera performance will reflect the things you’ve observed while cutting. Sometimes when I’m filming myself, I think “I just paused for way too long. Maybe if I hold still I can take out some frames in the edit!” or “My energy is way down, I should bump it up a little.”
On the other hand, sometimes I speak too quickly on camera for an erroneous word to be edited out, so I still need to learn to speak each word cleanly and not rush them together.
As for the framing of the shots, I used to have a videocamera that would allow me to crop the shots in playback. If you had put it on the tripod and then stood too far to one side, you could adjust it when making a copy. I wish my current cameras still offered that.
There’s probably some modern editing software that would allow you to do the same thing, though.
I actually thought the pacing was perfect. If it had gone any quicker, it would have been five seconds of Janine doing something, then the phone rings, repeat. The pauses between each one represent how she’s going about her real life and doing things. If I went any faster, it would be two minutes of improvised phone conversations, and that was not what I’d set out to make.
