Baseline Wolves: Circuit Man and Transistor Boy

Sometimes you are lucky enough to make a decision that, in hindsight, enriched your life in many different and beautiful ways. I had the fortune to make such a decision, which was taking the movie-making humanities course as an elective in IITK. I love IITK for having so many humanities courses as part of the curriculum; they were among my favorite subjects. But there was something special about ART101, the first video making course. It was to start quite an awesome journey.

The first assignment was to make a video showing a person going from the gate of his hostel to the academic building. The catch was the length of the video: it had to be around 10 or so seconds only. Before we started discussing ideas for the movie, we had to come up with a name for our production studio. After long and careful deliberation, we decided to go with Baseline Wolves. We all loved to crack cryptic crosswords and anagrams, so the name is a reflection of that. It’s an anagram of some words. I’ll let you figure it out.

So, back to the video we had to shoot. I remember discussing about speeding up a running sequence. Then the conversation turned quite naturally to super heroes. But which super hero should be chosen? Copying one is just too boring. We are more interesting than that. We came up with the superhero-sidekick combination ‘Circuit Man and Transistor Boy’, which is a kind of tribute to Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, characters in Spongebob Squarepants, one of the most epic shows of all time. But how were Circuit Man and his sidekick to get to the Academic Building in less than 10 seconds?

I don’t remember it now, but we probably would have realized that a superhero called Circuit Man would have some awesome electric beams and lightning storm attacks (and of course, he can repair your fuse). But going fast? Maybe it is not his domain. Somehow, we decided to give Circuit Man another ability, because, why not. He could copy superpowers of other superheroes. Anytime he wanted.

These creative licenses really helped the practical problems of what to shoot. With all the superheroes’ arsenals available to us, the ideas came along nicely. First, we wanted to use the idea of a super jump. Someone, I think it was Aditya, found a video on Youtube showing some awesome special effects one can make by simply playing the video backward. One of the effects was a super jump: basically a person jumps down 10 feet and lands and crouches and then stands and walks backward. Then you play it in reverse and it looks like he is crouching down and then jumping 10 feet straight up.

We decided to use this at the beginning, showing Circuit Man jumping to the top of the Hostel Wall. After that, we decided to use Nightcrawler’s power of teleportation. It would be easy to show from Circuit Man’s point of view: one shot of him pulling his cape (maybe this is why we gave him a cape?) over the camera, and the next of him pulling it from over the camera, in a different location. The two shots will blend into each other because both of them have the cape on the camera. So it will not look too jerky. That was the idea anyway.

We also wanted to use the running sequence we discussed earlier, so we decided to teleport Circuit Man to the gate of the academic area, where he would assume a runner’s stance and start sprinting. I and Ketan went to the top of the flat roofs of the Academic Building and got a nice aerial shot. I wanted to do a running sequence through a tunnel sort of walkway in the academic area, in first person perspective. It would have a nice effect because the tunnel had pillars on both sides. Speeded up, these pillars would fly by giving a great sense of speed.

Finally, we had to tackle the problem of how to get Circuit Man to the top of the building. Spiderman came to mind here. We were too amateur to even think of showing a slinging web and a person flying using CGI, so we kept it to the user’s imagination. We did, however, have a faithful recreation of the sound of the web sling, courtesy Gaurav I think.

Finally, a quick shot to show he was all dressed up under his superhero suit just like Spiderman himself. Overall, we ended up taking a bit extra time I think, as it was supposed to be around 6-8 seconds. But we didn’t feel like sacrificing any part of it. The superhero music, in a nice referential way, is the theme of (who else?) Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy. Oh, and speaking of Barnacle Boy, he had to be omitted in our video and could not assist Circuit Man in his perilous quests as we had but one person available to act. It was probably too soon to start thinking of double roles that Saketh could play.

Making a funny disclaimer was on the cards for a long, long time. It is one of those parodies that just have to be used. So, we ended the video with it. Then a small scene, meant to contrast his aerial entry with his normal boring departure.

I remember the night I was editing this video. We would always edit them on Thursday night, as the submission was always in the Friday 11am class. And this was one of few videos where I and Saketh did not stay up the night editing. Actually, I did not edit this video at all; I did not even know the software. I caught a friend, Soumil, to explain it to me and he edited the video as he explained. He was a great teacher and since he had kindly done the work, I drifted off to blissful sleep, forgetting to put the music in the video.

When I saw the video in class, I knew that it would have music, as I was told in the morning that it had been put. But I didn’t actually know what music it was. So that was a nice surprise. Overall, it turned out much better than I had imagined and I was very happy with it. And, I was quite excited to move on to bigger movies where the script would play a greater role.

The video:

The Desire to Write Shakespeare

Anger is definitely a thing that feeds on itself. Have you ever felt that moment when you are angry and you like it? It often happens to me. My mind then starts its ritual process of writing wonderful epics, like Shakespeare. It starts assuming things about the situation that made me angry, all to make me angrier.

An example? I meet a girl for five days in a row. For around 3 hours a day. We have great conversations. I cook dinner for her. And hot chocolate. We listen to the same music. The Beatles. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. Good old rock ‘n roll. We have a lot in common.

And then you start expecting things. And if a signal does not come, you mind pursues its desire to embellish. Who does she think she is? You start imagining things from her perspective, anyone else in her place would be floored with the amount of time and attention you’ve given her! And not even a bit of interest in return! Suddenly, you’re the forsaken hero with a heart of gold, in your own little movie, where you act like an ideal serenading man in spite of the female tearing your hope to shreds.

The mind makes a bigger deal of it than it really is. Maybe she was just busy that day. Who knows? There are too many assumptions made to reach the conclusions formed in my head. But can I blame my mind? With the amount of stories and heroes I throw at it, in the form of books, TV series, movies and video games; it is quite obvious that my mind would start treating everything as a part of a dramatic tale.

But the desire to write Shakespeare has a good side too. It makes things better in retrospect. The human mind is a wonderful thing. It filters out the bad memories and stores the good. Add to that the need to write a fable, and suddenly all your good times seem like paradise when you reminisce about them. Have you ever looked back at the past actions of your life and felt that they followed a kind of logical pattern, like a story? Have you ever looked back at a great week of debauchery in college and felt that it was the best time of your life? Well, there’s the mischievous mind at work.