So here’s my food truck for Cheese Wizards! They already have quite a nice truck but as soon as I thought of it I knew I wanted to make one for them. At the end of the day I just wanted to draw a cheese wizard so that’s what I did. I love my wizard, I love his expression, and I think it makes for a great main piece for the truck! However I wish I had budgeted more time for this project; the illustration took a while and I didn’t have much time left over for the rest of the truck.
With more time I would have added more detail to the siding and would have created my own type rather than finding an existing logo for the top/doors. I chose cheese colors which do stand out nicely on the street. I also know that yellow psychologically is supposed to make you hungry so that’s a plus. As a treat I put my favorite wizard in the window.
This project was such a pleasure to work on, even though we all said we felt like we’d just finished our finals when it was over. So much time ideating, writing, editing, and especially filming. We spent two days back to back filming from 2 till 8:30 PM, including a trip to a park in Ravenna for the scene in the woods. But the critically acclaimed “Racecar Movie” was worth it. And it would not have been possible without my incredible teammates Heather Van Walden and Alyssa Guzman!
I was sick the first friday and coordinated with them over Slack. They already had the base idea laid out: a meta-mockumentary about our team trying to make a movie. Even during our first video calls over Zoom I was impressed by how creative these two were. They were so good at coming up with an idea and building on it rapidly. Between the three of us we had no trouble filling the time-limit of our sketch. The problem was deciding what bits not to keep!
All three of us were in constant communication throughout the process and held each other to the standards necessary to get our somewhat ambitious ideas on film. It made the usual stresses of coordinating a group project so much easier. (It helped that we were all passionate about our idea as well.)
I could go on and on about the process of writing the script (which was really just a shot-list, we adlibbed most of the dialogue) and how incredibly well my team rolled with the wacky twists we kept coming up with. We collected all the props we could get our hands on, made a big mess in the conference room, and started shooting! Like my character I have some acting experience but I was so impressed with how willing my teammates were to push their nerves aside and get on camera. I think everyone performed really well, especially considering we were improvising dialogue on the fly!
We had some help with the cameras when all three of us needed to be onscreen, so shout out to Sana and Nate for stepping up and helping out. That said, Heather was the absolute MVP when it came to lighting, shooting, and editing. Alyssa and I are Graphic Design students and did our best to help with composition and editing but Heather took a crazy concept and a bunch of weird recordings and made an actually comprehensive video.
There was a day when we stayed after class and helped go through the first 1/3 of the footage and choose what takes worked and where the cuts should go. Alyssa had an incredible sense for timing and what takes worked well, and I wish I had Heather’s skill with premiere! They worked so fast I was gobsmacked.
A few days later we presented our creation (shoutout to Alyssa for working hard on the presentation) and the response was so much fun. From the laughs it seemed like our labour of love came out pretty dang well. I’m very proud of the work we did and my amazing teammates for making it what it was!
