This is the behind the scenes for Unnecessarily Intense: Boom Boom, and if you have not watched that one first then none of this is going to land, so go do that and come back.
The premise of the film, in full: a guy is playing Xbox, a guy needs the bathroom, the guy goes to the bathroom. That is it. That is the entire plot.
The Idea
Waldo explains the origin on camera and it is not complicated. Something extremely ordinary happened in our apartment, and one of us said out loud that real life is funny, and then somebody said the sentence that made the whole thing exist: why don’t we make this super epic?
That is the joke. There is no other joke. We took the least significant thing that happens in a day and shot it like the climax of a Michael Bay picture.
Making Something Boring Look Epic
Here is why this actually works, and why it is worth understanding even if you have no intention of ever filming anything this stupid.
An audience does not read a shot on its own. They read it against everything they have already been taught by every action movie they have ever sat through. Slow motion means this matters. A low angle means this person is powerful. A hard cut to a close up means pay attention. A big orchestral hit means consequence. None of that meaning lives in the thing you are pointing at. All of it lives in how you shoot it.
So whenever you take that grammar and aim it at something with no stakes whatsoever, the gap between how it is filmed and what is actually happening does the comedy for you. You do not have to write jokes. You just have to commit completely and never wink at the camera.
The plan we came up with covers every one of those: he takes a hit to the stomach like he has been shot, his face goes to obvious discomfort, he stands, he shoves his friend off the couch, it drops into slow motion, epic music comes in, and then there is a march down a hallway and through a door that we blocked out like a breach.
Blocking It Out Loud First
The genuinely useful thing in this behind the scenes is not the idea, it is that you can watch us plan it.
Waldo walks the whole thing physically, in the actual rooms, describing each beat out loud and pointing at where people will be, before a single frame gets shot. He stands where he will stand. He shows where he will push. He walks to the door and says he is going to hit it about here, and then tells me where I am going to be when he comes through.
That takes about ninety seconds and it is the difference between a shoot that works and an afternoon of arguing. We had no storyboard, no shot list, and no budget, and it did not matter, because we all had the same movie in our heads before we started. If you are making something with friends this weekend, do that part. It is free.
Same Couch, Same Apartment
If the room looks familiar, it is the same apartment and the same couch and the same blanket on the wall as the Impact video blogs we were making that same summer. Everything I shot in 2010 happened within about fifteen feet of that couch.