Cory McAbee traforms himself into a singing cowboy, and it’s all caught on camera.

Cory McAbee’s feature film The American Astronaut premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and went on to receive international acclaim. His short films include the award-winning Billy Nayer, the Pixelvision short The Man on the Moon and now the featured-film Reno.

The short features Cory McAbee as a singing cowboy, bragging about his travels through Nevada on a Honda 50 to a store security camera. “I think it’s nice that people who promote independent work are getting involved on this level when something like this is just beginning. For them to be involved – to be there at the starting gate – and produce independent work for that format is wonderful.” comments Cory McAbee.

The elements featured in this film were created as collage. The source material used for the still images and alternative security camera shots were taken with a small, handheld digital camera. (Nikon Coolpix 3100) These images were sent via email to the graphic designer and to the film’s editors.

The graphic designer worked in Photoshop to simplify the images, eliminate much of the detail, alter the color, and inlay generic products to create a fake reality. A single, still character was placed in an exterior shot. This character was also created through collage. The simplification was used to eliminate brand names and logos, as well as to create a richer looking still image for a 2×2 screen.

The editors transferred the same digital photographs into black & white and used them as they were. The soft focus of the originals made it possible to used the photos without the concern of logos or brand names. A live action character was filmed in front of a green screen and overlaid onto two of these stills. The stills were given a grey tone, as to where the character was given a hard black tone to resemble early animation.

The main store interior shot was filmed using a Sony HDV 1ZU camera placed high up on a store refrigerator. The height and angle of the camera were recorded for later use. Three moving elements were filmed at this location. The first were of the store clerk nodding his head, the second was the store clerk turning the page of a newspaper, the third was of a child dancing in front of the counter. The motions for each were altered separately and looped.

At a later date a 360 degree greenscreen was created out of paper. 4 Sony HDV 1ZU cameras were used to capture 3 separate performances from 4 identical angles. The 4 cameras were placed at the same height and angle as the camera used for the in-store location shoot. Because of unexpected technical difficulties we were not able to test our results on set. The minor variations caused by this problem were corrected by the editors who cut and pasted individual body parts to bridge the gaps between edits. The 4 separate takes of the 3 actions were pasted together to create loops. This entire process was done on a laptop using After Effects, Avid XPress Pro. Edits were posted on-line every couple of days and edited via email.

Several of the elements heard in the audio track were recorded on a small, handheld RadioShack cassette recorder. The street sounds were recorded on a corner in Brooklyn, the mechanical sound that we hear when panning between security cameras was a traffic signal fuse box, and the soft buzzing of the security cameras were the hiss of two stereo speakers. The first drum track we hear was also recorded live onto a cassette. These elements were then transferred into a ProTools system. The drums were then looped, and a clean drum track was performed as an overlay. The clean drum track and the rest of the music was recorded on ProTools. The audio track was mixed and edited on ProTools. The finished product was sent via email to the editors as an MP3 file.

A brief attempt to further smooth over some of the edits through animation was made, but after seeing a couple of the changes I felt the film would lose some of its nature and signed off on it as it was. It was then uploaded via email onto the Sundance site using Avid Source compression off an Avid XPress Pro System.

For more information on Reno, or to see more of Cory McAbee’s work, visit corymcabee.com