Hi all, Thanks for the positive comments... this was really a labor of love and it's such a pleasure to finally get to share this with all of you....
There were some questions sprinkled about here so I'll try to answer all of them with these production notes...
It Came from Muppet Labs started production during early summer 2003. Originally, this was going to be a very short 5 minute parody of frankenstein. I didn't even really bother much with sets beyond the standard lab playset. But as I started shooting the little segments, I started thinking of more things to add in... they were small ideas at first, but each idea spawned another one and then that would spawn even more ideas.
I finally figured if I'm going through the trouble, I might as well make this as good as I can make it. I ditched a lot of the early footage and began shooting with better sets and attempted more complicated camera moves and situations.
The movie never had a script, I would shoot a scene, load it onto the computer, and decide from there where it would go next. I've found that strangely enough, my best work happens this way. It's not the quickest way to work, but the end product ends up being better.
In the end, the raw footage for this movies consists of around five hours worth of material. I'd say that I loaded around 350 different shots into my computer of which 250 ended up in the final film. The time frame for all of this was roughly 4-5 months. (this wasn't constant labor mind you, I would take weeks off here and there)
A lot of people so far have commented on liking the music... What I used was:
Bach's Toccata and Fugue (the organ music in the opening credits and after beaker attacks Bunsen)
Stravinski's Rite of Spring (sprinkled all throughout the movie)
Mussorgsy's Night on Bald Mountain. (after beaker turns plush)
Chicago movie soundtrack overture (music playing after Bunsen "wakes up")
The "patton" sequence is simply a standard military bugle call called "To the colors"
The drumming during the crowd scene and the fight scene were both improvised beats performed by yours truly.
and of course, Putting on the Ritz from Young Frankenstein.
Also of interest is that there are actually around 20 "object removals" throughout the movie. The most obvious one is during the fight scene when all the piggys fly through the air a la matrix reloaded. They were all attached by dowels that had to be digitally removed. The others are more subtle such as my fingers when they would slip into frame or the wires controlling the fall of the flowers down the well. These object removals were all acomplished by importing the footage into photoshop and manipulating the image frame by frame.
Another thing I think is really cool is the windmill... I have to give my wife the props on that one because I asked her to build me one to just stand in the background and she ended up creating one that actually worked. So the windmill is being powered in that scene by a small fan blowing on the blades. It ended up being a tad too fast so I cut the speed of the footage in half so that it didn't seem like there was a class 5 hurricane blowing.
A few more random notes...
The lightning footage was all taken over the course of two seperate nights outside of my house. I would point my camera in the general direction of the lightning and hope for the best. As cool as some of the lightning I captured on film was, there was some really sweet bolts that I missed by being pointed slightly the wrong way. The moon footage was shot for around 15 minutes time lapse on a cloudly night.
Well, that's about it I guess... if anyone has any other questions about how certain things were done or whatnot, I'm happy to answer. Thanks again everyone and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
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