2009 MARITIME HOTEL VIDEO-PROPOSAL VIDEO (no music)
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About This Video
The 2009 Maritime Hotel video proposal. A pitch document showing how Van sold a project to potential collaborators. The proposal format reveals professional infrastructure behind independent filmmaking. Pre-production as its own art form.
Transcript
so my idea for the maritime movie is uh based on the trailer for The Shining and in case you've forgotten I'm gonna show
you what it looks like whenever uh this is from 2009 and whenever I had a prospect of getting a gig I
would try to get out ahead of it and make these little proposal movies so
Eric good who's a co-owner of the maritime Hotel in New York came to me and said normally we send out
gifts uh for the holiday season but because of the you know the stock I'm
sorry the financial crash in 2008 we're cutting back our budget we're going to just do a video and send it out to
everybody do you want to make it and so I came up with this idea and made this little video
and sent it to him and Eric good is a very important New York cultural figure
for a certain era he's an incredible host he was great to work with and he's probably best known for being
the writer and director of Tiger King the big Netflix hit that came out at the beginning of the pandemic and so this is
the Kubrick um trailer for The Shining and I always just thought it was amazing because it's
just so minimal one shot super beautiful I mean I think it took them you know months to set it up and so here I go into my explanation of what I'm going to make for Eric
obviously our movie is going to be shot in the lobby of the maritime and we built this set to give you an idea of
what we were thinking okay so here's the mock-up of your elevators
in our movie the elevator doors are going to open and inside you're gonna see a really
sexy girl in her underwear and a really sexy guy in his underwear and they're going to have pillows down pillows with
the tops cut off and they're gonna be dumping them into these two industrial fans and uh
so what it will be is the door was to the elevator will open and all of
this feathers will come flying out and it'll it'll look a little bit like it'll look a bit like snow act three of this movie
will be a girl and probably just panties with this Banner wrapped around her
running into the frame now remember this is going to be shot in about 640 frames per second super slow motion so she'll
be sprinting across the frame with this Banner wrapped around her to cover her up and at the end of the
banner will be a man a sexy guy in his underwear holding the other end of the
banner and then he'll disappear out of frame the elevator door will close
and the feathers which will look like snowflake will uh sort of descend to the ground
and uh Fade to Black for this proposal we ran out and bought um
a consumer high-speed camera this shoots 640 frames per second I think that's the frame rate we should use
but it's super duper low quality so you'll have to forgive me but it'll give you an idea of kind of the depth you get
from the flying debris at the camera and so I'll just show you the the kind of the mock-up that we shot
and so I got the job job and we had to build an entire tent around
the elevators in the maritime Hotel because for multiple takes we had to clean up every single one of those
feathers and that's it I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas and I hope we get to work together
and this was a big production for me because we had to hire this camera it was called a Sony Phantom and it shot super fast it was a digital camera but
it required like an entire Suite of computers to run it the following slow motion film was shot over the course of
eight seconds and we had to light this thing for 26 ASA or ISO film as if we were shooting on 26 ISO film so it was like daylight in there you know the camera I use now
my Canon I use 400 ASA or 400 ISO and this was 26 so tons of these very dangerous super super bright lights and we hired a
cinematographer to supervise the whole thing we have all these fans going off of off camera to blow these feathers everywhere
and we had a light inside that elevator and I said to the DP now can you absolutely guarantee me that this
will be safe I think it's going to catch fire and he said yes yes definitely yes and damn him it caught fire with those two
girls in there and the door closed and the the the the the the lobby there was Smoke in there and it
was you know it was an operating Hotel I mean you know it was a 10 second fire and we had fire extinguishers and we put it out but man that was like the take
before this one and so you see all these feathers between takes we had to come in there with um
lint rollers and clean up every single one of these feathers
but we were well prepared and we did it for the budget and um I think it's really great
and then oh yeah this was a last minute idea we had the guy who was actually the one of the custodians and he came in
with the vacuum cleaner but that whole thing was shot in eight seconds that whole event
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Sony Phantom camera mentions — high-speed camera
- Canon camera (400 ISO) uses — filming equipment
People Referenced
Eric Goode, Stanley Kubrick
Films & Media Referenced
- Kubrick film, hotel aesthetics comparison
- Eric Goode directed