STS - Armory

A time elapse montage showcasing the construction of an armory of realistic sci-fi weaponry from NERF guns and Super Soakers. Conceptually, the task is not that daunting - just take the plastic gun apart, spray paint it, put it back together.  Piece of cake!  The actual undertaking, on the other hand, is far more epic.  The five minutes you see here has been boiled down from 27+ hours of footage over the course of two weeks.  The amount of hard drive space that takes up was ridiculous!  

The end product, however, is fit for movies.  That's just the reason we went to all this effort!  Just wait until they start turning up in our upcoming movies.

“Armory” is Stranger Things Studios’ 8th movie, and thus far the closest thing to a behind-the-scenes that we’ve ever done.

Please remember that when you make a gun look realistic like this, you can cause a great deal of alarm and trouble if people mistake it for a real gun.  Keep that in mind before painting your own.  Thanks!

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

In 2006 I was working for the now defunked electronics company Ultimate Electronics, previously known as Audio King.  In the beginning of that year our store was without a store manager.  To alleviate that problem, assistant managers were brought in from other stores and put on overlapping, rotating schedules.  What this meant was that I saw a lot of new faces come and go during that time.

The beauty of being a warehouse employee, outside of the fact that we barely had customer contact, were essentially forgotten and unmonitored and had plenty of time to surf the web; we didn’t have to listen to the satellite radio that played on the sales floor. We had our own speaker system, and seeing how we were in an electronics store, we had a good one. And we got to listen to whatever we wanted!!!! Seeing how at the time there was only two of us, it was either techno as my coworker Bryan gravitated towards, or my movie soundtracks.

The Big Boy with the lights on. Not quite the same effect...

I have only ever met two people who listen to the kind of music I do. Sure, you have you people who want to sound interesting and say they do; those are posers, they don’t count. I’m talking about people who have thrown me off because of their knowledge of the genre. Two. And back in 2006, that number was none. So, when some random assistant manager for another store walked into my warehouse and didn’t ask what I was listening to, but rather verified that it was what he thought it was, and who the composer was, and then noted the similarities to that composer’s other works, as well as other contemporary writers, I thought to myself (and probably out load) “Holy crap, there are others out there.” 

I honestly only ever talked to the man a few times over the course of no more than a week and a half, but we hit it off pretty well. Well, he rotated out. I left the company. The company went bankrupt within a year. Life moved on. 

When I finally started using my Facebook page, I began by hunting down old friends and coworkers. While I was at it, I decided to see if I could find this guy again. All I knew was that his first name was Randy. Fortunately, one of the customer service girls was friends with everyone on Facebook. With her help, he wasn’t hard to find. I sent a friend request, as well as a “hey, hi, I don’t know if you remember me…” message. To my surprise he accepted the friend request, and that was that. We never talked again... 

Not until I started making movies. As I got into the fall of this year and made it my goal to put out a movie a month, I was finding that royalty free music is not an ideal way to go for a score. There’s no progression; it’s repetitive; and searching out all the copyright and arbitration information was a nightmare. What I needed was someone who could write music. 

I remembered at that point that Randy not only enjoyed musical scores, but did his own composing. On a whim, I wrote him and asked if he was somehow interested in helping out. And, oh, by the way, it’d be unpaid; I haven’t made any money doing this, so I don’t have any to give. I kind of figured that seeing how we never talked, what was the worse that could happen? He’d never talk to me again, or he’d de-friend me? I figured it was worth a shot. 

To my surprise, he wrote back with a resounding “I am definitely in!!” 

“Armory” marks the second movie that Randy has written music for, and he is currently in the process of composing January’s score. We still have yet to actually talk, but in his e-mails he has been very enthusiastic about contributing his creativity and energy. It’s great to have him on the team, and he has signed on for the foreseeable future. 

I could not have pulled off “Armory” without Randy. A video of this nature rides on the music as much as it does on the video, if not more. Try watching it without the sound on. The only reason I ever got through it was because I was editing it. It's only once you layer the music on top of that you breathe life into it.