Cravenomena

Here’s another spot Craven wrote, directed, produced and animated for the Cabaret Dinner Theatre in Grand Junction, Colorado. My local readers know the Cabaret closed its doors this year, after a decade as the Grand Valley’s primary theatrical outlet. During most of that time, it was up to Craven to produce all of their television commercials, and here’s one he did for their first production of ALWAYS… PATSY CLINE.

The Cabaret commercials often posed interesting production challenges, and this spot was no exception. Due to scheduling issues, we almost never had access to a production’s sets (and, on occasion, even costumes) when it came time to create the television commercials (which, because they were aired in the weeks before a show’s opening, had to be produced sometimes months before the actual theatrical show went up).

In this case, I had access only to Kelly Asuka, the very talented actress portraying country singer Patsy Cline, and a somewhat plain character dress. Period. So the initial creative question was how to create interest in the show with just that to work with?

Obviously, it was important to feature the music of Patsy Cline. Beyond that, I reckoned we could suggest the late ’50s-early ’60s milieu by means of the creative use of technological artifacts like an old school record player, a period microphone and a retro television set.

Of course, that meant modeling those artifacts in 3D, since I don’t own an early ’60s record player, mic or television set — and, even if I did, I didn’t have access to the jibs or cranes that would be necessary to perform the kind of fluid camerawork I envisioned for the spot. So after shooting Kelly performing a Patsy Cline song before a bare bluescreen, I set to work modeling the forementioned props in Newtek Lightwave‘s Modeler program.

I was lucky in that I had previously modeled a realistic retro microphone for a 2000 commercial for KAFM, the radio station where Craven “works” as a programmer. One of the advantages of 3D animation is that, once a prop is modeled for one project, it can be reused just like a real-world prop for another. But that still left the television set and record player, as well as album covers, 45 rpm spindles, newspapers, etc.

Modeling something like a record player is certainly not as difficult as modeling a realistic, complex organic form like, say, a human being, but it still presents certain challenges, especially if you’re striving for a measure of realism and intend to position the camera close to the player. My first step was to find visual reference. Internet image search engines like Google and AltaVista are only so useful for this sort of thing; even if you find an image of a period-appropriate device, chances are it will be too low-res and will offer only one view of the object. Instead, I turned to one of the 3D modeler’s secret resources: eBay.

When it comes to objects like television sets and record players, you will often find retro examples clearly documented from several angles by sellers looking to unload their old electronics on eBay. Sure enough, I found beautiful examples of a portable record player and a portable TV set clearly photographed, painstakingly rebuilt them as 3D models, and choreographed a single 30-second camera move in Lightwave‘s Layout program.

One other thing I like about this spot is something which illustrates Craven’s (and the Cabaret’s) bizarre sense of humor. Starting in 2000, every commercial produced for the Cabaret featured a “hidden” image of Mickey Rooney somewhere within. Why? Because Cabaret co-owner Kevin McConnell and Craven share a love for the exuberant and occasionally even freakish oeuvre of the comic actor. In the case of the PATSY CLINE spot, I was able to plant a very obvious Mickey Rooney placement on the newspaper (which also features a press shot of Kelly that was shot by Grand Junction’s best professional photographer, Chad Mahlum, and the layout of which was based on Grand Junction’s DAILY SENTINEL).

The narrator’s voice was provided by the dulcet pipes of Lee Borden.