The Making of The Mechanicals
Right after I completed school my wife and I moved to Chicago. I didn’t have much free time, equipment, or money to do many projects of ambition. Therefore this became the first of many explorations into reductive filmmaking and experimenting with story structure. With a complete nine episode run we all learned a lot and eventually wound up with a clunky little web series that somehow wound up on a late night broadcast in the UK.
I’ve got a Nikon 5100, A stepladder, and a few lights from Home Depot. So what in the world do I do with it? I quit my retail job not too long ago, and I’m very much trying to figure out what comes next.
I kinda know how to point a camera, I know you’re supposed to work fast….and keep things short. But even after 4 years in school, I’m still not really sure how to write a good story and I’m really nervous about writing something I can’t film.
I don’t even have proper mics so I gotta be real careful how I figure out something to film. So that’s where the idea of masks came from. -but it will only work if the mask is interesting, and maybe more of a character abstraction than something justified by the narrative. If I’m lucky I can get a bit of both...so I take a lazy route and opt for my characters to be robots. Made out of cardboard.
Cool. I think I can make awkward cardboard robots into something. Maybe. I’ve got an apartment...and as cliche as roommates might be, these crappy robot costumes are working for me. It’s novelty absolutely disguises how bad of a premise this really is.
There’s a problem though. I’m really bad at writing. I mean. I’m trying hard and I certainly feel these weird little dialogue riffs are fun...but I don’t think I have characters or anything that really happens here. Note to self, keep learning about storytelling.
Till then, it’s nonsense. That’s okay. If I have to work from somewhere, might as well be here. So the basic idea is they’re robots, and they’re roommates...and then there are some dialogue interactions...but really, it doesn’t go anywhere. We’ll figure it out in post.
To expand on our basic costume ideas, we grabbed a bunch of old cardboard, cut it up into random different robots, and then painted everything in these bold uniform colors. And as we went, we realized that the shittier the job, the better it looked on camera. Texture or something.
Filming with friends was pretty awesome. Doug Burbank is always a great actor to work with, and Sara puts up with my antics. We made ourselves laugh more than a few times, but deep down, I’m pretty sure they’re just kinda humoring me.
Editing for these sketches was a weird experience. It wasn’t particularly difficult, and we didn’t overshoot so the overall process went quickly, but I can tell there’s a lot missing. I reworked the pieces several times and got feedback from a lot of savvy production friends...but you know what they say about polishing turds.
We did actually host a viewing for friends. A nice little social evening with drinks and snacks. Everyone really reinforced the idea that I didn’t exactly write anything of substance...but there were a few lucky comedic moments that still happened on screen...and that’s a win. I’ll need to study what worked and what didn’t work.
The most amazing thing, was when I was putting these little videos out on social media to incredibly small view counts… We still were approached by Sky TV, and The Mechanicals was actually picked up for a brief run on late night television!
So who knows. I swear I didn’t make a particularly good webseries, but still wound up on television somewhere on the planet. I’m really not sure if I learned anything haha.
