Thread by @electrolemon

hi!! today is the last day to donate @ sept21st.com and be entered into the painting/jersey raffle. we are at $950,000 (good lord) and i have not yet been able to put together my promised rundown, but as a final push to $1 million (holy cow) here's a few BTS videos---

this is the beginning of the sequence 'outside' of the mirror, captured by art director @agzw_. you can see our grip troy crouched behind the staircase of appleboxes so he could secure it for our camera op to move up there lol

that sequence continues with a whip pan (which i had to thoroughly construct in post, more on this later) to the other side of the bar (cannot figure out why this video looks so blown out but it's not worth spending this much time on)

this, is where we get to the bathroom scene. we spent 4 days in the heat up in Valenica constructing 5 walls for the set and fitted them into a giant 10x10 rotating wheel gimbal (one of only 3 in CA apparently! spent a long time just tracking one down!)

here's our very first test of me dancing in the rotated set (without full production design) on the evening of Aug. 27th. i clamped a camera to the corner of the room to watch for outside shadows and see how the effect would hopefully look in the end

production design of the bathroom: aside from just finishing the box itself, we couldn't put a real toilet in there (heavy, murderous 2 me) and couldn't find a light/fake alt, so our PD cheyenne handcrafted one out of foam over several days

we shot the bathroom scene the night of Aug 28th. did 5 takes and used the 4th. here's a video from outside by @cat_elg synced to my pov camera (with me screaming "that's showbiz" at the end for some reason. iono man. it was late. i turn into the mask after 1am)

this kind of shot usually has a locked camera but i wanted it to be fluid & use x-axis motion to transition in/out of the room. so to test our ideas for shooting it i built a 1/12th scale version at home. indulgent? oh yea for sure. but more importantly? a lot of fun for me :)

we shot the bathroom sequence first because we didn't know how long the rotation would be– when we realized it would be ~55 sec, i decided this would be the first year i use the full song (not a rights issue like people thought, that's never been a problem lol)

i really wish i'd taken a video of my friends who played extras at the bar when i showed everyone the bathroom sequence because everyone screamed and loved it and it was really encouraging. :) i do however, have this video of @IfyNwadiwe seeing it for the first time

bonus detail: the little move i do in front of the disco ball is because that fuckin motion sensor thing was so finicky and didn't really work so I tried repeatedly to activate it lol. here's a photo @ed_ballart of me brooming the mf like a loud upstairs neighbor

i dive out the box onto a crash pad w/ green fabric, which i keyed out to hide the transition to the party scene (does this count as a texas switch @tvaziri) - captured here in a .gif of photos taken by @ed_ballart (including me pointing at a bug. seemed like a good luck omen)

the party scene: shot at Willis Wonderland, the magnificent home of the late great Allee Willis (who co-wrote 'september', amongst many other hits)– we first scouted the house on July 16th, then came back to plan the drone shot (for night/day) on Aug. 24th (no sound)

i spent a while trying to figure out what to do for the end confetti instrument then thought it would be fun and insane to rig a drum with a confetti cannon. so we rented a cannon, built it into a drum, replaced the heads w/ tissue paper, and tested it in my backyard

since my dancing in these is always spur of the moment i wanted to end with at least ONE actual planned dance, so i asked my pals @sukiestyles + @meganbatoon (who un-retired from dance to do this!!) to choreograph an ending. they taught it to me 3 days before shooting, Sept. 7

we shoot the party scene on the evening of Sept. 10th! spend the afternoon decorating the house (but not too much because it's already a beautiful house)

honestly i have way too many fantastic BTS photos of the party alone, courtesy of @noahedwardmorse. wish i could post them all. do not tire yourself by trying to keep track of how many different pairs of overalls i have worn through these, there are even more than depicted

we had 5 CO2 canisters for the cannon, minus one from the test, so we had 4 takes of the actual party. we spent the most time on the last one to get the perfect drone movement, which @ed_ballart absolutely nailed. here's another angle of the 3rd take

there's a cut at the end (the 1st diegetic cut of the whole series) right before the confetti: the cannon misfired on the last take. i reached out to some VFX artists about making a depth map so i could insert CG confetti, but ultimately said 'oh whatever' and cut to another take

a thing that made me excited: @agzw_ came up with the BA DE YA letters the night before shooting, and during the shoot our friends jocey, zach, & hannah came up with the idea to turn them into 'BYE' for the crowd shot. i genuinely screamed 'man my friends are geniuses' lol

the uber stylish roller girls in the back are the women i skate with every wednesday, called the Wheel Housewives of LA. this crew is how i met our costume designer @cat_elg and Carlie Armstrong, who helped with costumes and foam-toilet-crafting. they are awesome :)

shoot wraps ~10pm, we spend the next 2 hours cleaning. there's confetti everywhere. it's biodegradable but damn why did we do this (2nd photo is Cheyenne w/ Allee's partner, the great Prudence Fenton– who absolutely did not have to help us but was happy to, and ultra lovely 🥰)

the grease ending: the epitome of a "just for me" gag. the convo in the beginning did not exist until way later. i kept giggling about the idea of ending the video with the Grease car and everyone going "what. why" and when i told @LizMaupin she encouraged it. soooo we did it!

Liz tracked down a few cars that were similar to the 1948 Ford De Luxe convertible used for Greased Lightning– we ended up using a 1940 Mercury convertible owned by a man who lived in Long Beach, so @LizMaupin, DP @BETThole, @Buncahn & I drove down there the next morning

a morning shoot was easiest, but i did think about doing a day-for-night sky replacement to match the previous shot, before reminding myself this is not worth the fucking hassle and anyone who complains, me included, is a nerd. got a costume from party city & shot it in 2 hours!

i made the red more vibrant in post & added the greased lightning bolts (after not having time to cut proper magnetic bolts and just using the magnets as tracking markers) – i did a take where i climbed over ben because i knew tracking would be a nightmare if i opened the door

lastly, the puppet: this fantastic Portuguese artist Pats Costa had reached out after making some very nice art of me (and my dog Clooney riding a skateboard!) a while back and we struck up a friendship after she released a Hot Rod zine that I loved: instagram.com/drawingsbypats/

she reached out in May, coincidentally RIGHT as we started planning, saying she'd started making puppets and asked if I wanted one for the video. by August, she was like "i made it" and sent it to me. and i absolutely love the little fucker. perfect for ruining zoom meetings

i did the call-to-action Sept. 19th, the morning of the Emmys (lol) and did the puppeteering myself in a split-screen. the next day Sept. 20th i was frustrated with the bad framing (because i did it alone– idiot!!!) so i reshot it on a green-screen. this was the last thing shot.

(we are covered in styrofoam because everything in my yard is covered in styrofoam now. and forever.)

the very last thing i did was an audio pass, and whoops that is probably why the levels are so low on the video. apparently i leveled it to -42db and not -3db. sorry! i could blame Adobe but really i finished at 5:28am and then got two hours of sleep before waking up for work!

however i am very lucky because the writer's room for Strange Planet (on Apple TV+ eventually, buy a subscription or whatever!) is a bunch of sweethearts and they called off work for the day. we all got together at 9:15 and watched the video together on Zoom as it went up 🥺

!!!! holy cow. we did it. we hit $1 million. that's over $300k for abortion access, hurricane relief, and climate advocacy- EACH. i'm flabbergasted & flummoxed & several other jerry lewis words. SO many specific thanks i'll have to do later, but wow. i love you all, thank you ❤️