Monster Mash

Cast
Mad tissue engineer - Larry Cunningham
The Monster - Bill Mohler
Chorus - Anna Pappalardo, Joan Williams, Joan Caron
Ghouls - Marina Freudzon, Rindy Jaffe, Sam Pace, Rachael Norris, Vivian Ho, Jonathan Romak, Andrea DiLuigi
Zombies (left to right) - Victoria Scranton, Kristy Freeman, and Brian Dacanay
Wolfman - Bruce White
Dracula - Ion Moraru
Dracula's son - Jeff Dutton
The Coffin Bangers (left to right) - Irina Semenova, Oleg Nadiarnykh, Bruce White, Cliff Williams, Jonathan Romak
The Crypt Kicker Five (left to right) - Jon Ditlev, Rachael Norris, Sam Pace, Marina Freudzon, Elizabeth Weitzke, Nick Hernjak
Coffin dancer - Volodya Rodionov
Conference room dancers - Les Loew, Lei Jin
Heads in red bag waste - Mark Zajac, Jim Schaff, Mark Terasaki
Spinning head - Anna Pappalardo
Witch - Ann Cowan

The Russians
Igor: Igor Novak, a post doc who in early October suddenly dropped everything to go to Moscow and get married
Boris: Boris Slepchenko, a physicist in the dept.

Production Notes

Mark had the idea that a music video would be easy to make for several reasons: wouldn't have to invent dialogue, the length of the movie is fixed (no danger of going too long), the scenes could be filmed with the music background then edited by synchronizing the video with the sound track. At some point, Mark thought of doing a music video of "The Monster Mash" because of the opening line "I was working in the lab late one night..." and because there were a couple of Russians in the cell biology department whose names were mentioned in the song. In spring 05, Mark and Larry Cunningham agreed to try to do it. After Mark returned from the summer, Larry and Joan Williams worked a lot on ideas, recruiting the talent, organization, and props. Most of the filming was done by Mark with a Sony DV camcorder (DCR-PC5); the band close up scenes and electrode scene were taken by Larry with his digital camera (Canon PowerShot A75). Stills were taken with a digital camera (Larry's or Nikon D50). Mark assembled the material using the Macintosh program Final Cut Express.

The opening scenes with Larry and the Monster were filmed and edited along with a few bits and pieces, on Tuesday and Wednesday of the week before Halloween. The Ghouls and band scenes were filmed on Thursday, and the Zombies and Dracula scenes were filmed on Friday. Editing of most of the video was done on Saturday, from 11 to 6 or so, and then the floating heads and witch scenes were done on Sunday morning. On Monday (Halloween), a few small modifications were made (witch's motion to coincide with growls, some cropping of coffin scene, etc). The movie was shown at the department halloween party that afternoon.

In its original DVD format (Mpeg 2 compression), the movie is ~750 MB. The web version was reduced from 720x480 pixels to 360x240 pixels, the sound was reduced from stereo 44 KHz to mono 8 KHz, and the compression used was H264 medium quality (all of this using Quicktime Pro). With these settings, the movie became 9.6 MB!

Special effects: The original idea for the chorus of heads was that they would be on a shelf in the background of the first scene. Their eyes would be closed at first, and then when the monster began to dance, the heads would start singing. However, after filming, it was too hard to incorporate them into the monster scene. Firstly, it was difficult to set up a good angle for the monster scene which would show a shelf in the background. Secondly, the heads simply looked pastted in, probably because of the different ways that the two scenes were lit. So we ended up using the heads in front of smoke or the "tower". To make the scene, Anna, Joan W., and Joan C. were filmed in front of a blue sheet, then combined with a background scene of dry ice fumes or Health Center tower using chroma key, further cropped using a 4 point garbage matte, colored green using RGB balance filter and finally set to 50% opacity. The drifting motion was set using the motion controls.

For the spinning head, Anna was photographed in front of the blue sheet as she rotated 360 in 8 steps, then her head was grafted onto the first picture in Photoshop. For the witch, Ann was photographed in front of a blue sheet, and was made to move across the screen using the motion controls in Final Cut.

The singing heads in the red bag waste were due to an idea from Jim Schaff, who was talking about the talking heads in Monty Python. Rindy had the idea of putting the heads in the red bag wastte. Single photos were taken of the three people. A second image of each was made by cutting out the chin region and displacing it downwards. The closed and open mouth images were synchronized with the words in the film making program. However, we found that it was more effective if a third image of each was made by displacing the chin region half way for use with certain syllables. For instance, with "mon - ster", the open mouth would be used for "mon" and the half open mouth would be used for "ster".

The transparent ghouls were made by layering the video over a still image of a blank hallway, and setting the opacity of the overlay video to 50%.

Russian subtitles: These were provided by Oleg Nadiarnykh.