When Life Hands You Corn, Make Lemonade | The Making of Harvest
About 18 months ago, UBK’s very own Nathan Hennenfent approached Mitch and I with an idea; cornhusking.
As a former competitive cornhusking champion, Nathan suggested we hit the road towards his hometown of Roseville, IL to document the annual competition. We planned off and on for the next 6 months and we were prepped and ready. The rental camera was in, the Hyundai Tucson was picked up from Enterprise and then…it was cancelled.
Bad weather made for muddy cornfields and less than ideal husking conditions, but since we had gear and a car, we decided to head west anyway in hopes that luck would be on our side. It wasn’t.
Although the contest was a bust, we did get some great soundbites and a hell of a husking tutorial from the one and only Frank Hennenfent, so at least we weren’t heading home without any usable footage. But as usual, that wasn’t enough for the ‘ole BizBear Crew.
Frank Hennenfent demonstrates superb cornhusking technique.
We started filming random shots of Nathan in a cornfield as well as some overly cinematic drone shots, but nothing to marry them together. The night before I had whipped up a short two pager of an idea that would hopefully lend some structure to the random shots we were grabbing.
The Original HARVEST Script
We made due with what we had and headed home where the footage sat. All those 0’s and 1’s collecting dust in hard drive purgatory. I dabbled with the footage within that month, but a first cut was never established.
A year later, the dust has been cleared and a fresh pair of eyes picked up where I left off and there you have it - a sort of planned but not really monster-ish sort of Halloween-y themed shorty McShort short done just ahead of 2019’s All Hallow’s Eve. Better late than never, unless you hate it, then you probably wish we left it on the shelf.
For you tech heads out there we shot on a Sony FS5 with the RODE NTG4+ shotgun mic for all the run and gun footage. The aerials were done with a DJI Mavic Air.
Also there was some fun After Effects experiments we did in this one.
The top frame is as it was out of camera. The middle is the sky replaced, sped up to make the clouds move faster, and in the scene the color changes from grey to green over the course of the shot. And the final frame is Nathan rotoscoped to be above the sky plate and a cold breath added.
We also dirtied up the barn a bit by 3D tracking the drone shot and adding some stock photos of texture.
We didn’t do any effects on this shot, it’s just my favorite shot and Mitch looks like a badass.
If there’s anything else you’d like to know, drop us a line: info@ubkstudios.com.
