Staycation Part III – The New Benders

Towards the end of my staycation, we fished around for some new ideas, made some future plans for a sleepover with friends, and began to clean the house in anticipation of a coming garage sale.

[tangent]
Now, several weeks later, the garage is clogged with all of that garage sale stuff – not the best promoters.
But I digress.
[/tangent]

One particular early evening The Mermaids and I sat down to a movie and I rebuffed the usual suspects; My Little Princess-Pony-Carebear-Mermaid-Barbie just wasn’t on my menu tonight – so I put my foot down and said (with that over-super-ultra-mega-mondo excitement meant to drum up support that is frankly…aaaaa bit transparent to The Mermaids. Or to any kid really; in this day and age of carefully architected marketing savvy? I must sound like I’ve only got one bar on my cellphone.

So I said, all ultra-mega like,

I know! Let’s watch The Last Airbenderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Nooooooo – Daddy!?! We wanna watch My-Little-Princess-Pony-CareBear-Mermaid-Barbie!!

Sigh.
A little weaker this time.

Nope – Daddy is vetoing that one. Let’s watch The Last Airbender. It’s supposed to be good! 🙂

How the heck should I know?

But Daaaadddddyyyyy?!?!?!?……….does it have a girl in it?
No.

But am I hearing a spark of possibility in that question?!

Then I don’t wanna watch it!
ME NEITHER!

Drat! Guess I’m gonna have to go 1950’s on ’em.

Fine. Then I’ll watch it myself and you two can go do something else.

…and I hit play, on my little remote, with such…authority! I’m so 1950’s.

Only five minutes later I had two very engaged Mermaids on my lap, eyes wide, mouths open. In a phrase – they loved it.

You see, it’s a story about a young boy who can control the primary elements of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. And he, and his children group of power-specialists, can “bend” those elements to their will. A mix of martial arts, fantasy, naturally a love story, and a healthy dose of kid power led to The Mermaids doing their usual – acting out their favorite scenes, picking out clothes that resemble the characters and reliving the movie.

Then one of them asked,

How do they do that?

I attempted a movie making explanation and since it was still light out I went the ostensive route and said

C’mon, let’s go outside and make a quick movie. Just a test.

With action movie eagerness, we spent about 15 minutes setting up and shooting the various scenes in our backyard, one take only, and then repaired to my Macintosh to cut it together quickly – maybe 20 minutes. It was understandably choppy and lame and actually, quite perfect.

They liked it so much, they must’ve watched all 45 seconds about ten times, huge grins and all. So I proposed,

Tomorrow, let’s do it full on – right.

So we did, The Mermaids picked their costumes, we manufactured some “weapons”, and over breakfast we spent a good deal of time (and I burned through some Mermaid patience) writing a scene storyboard. With all that, and more, in hand, we moved the operation to a small wooded section of our neighborhood and what you see below is the result – a crowning achievement to an excellent staycation.

All in all, there is probably 20 min of footage, which took about 2 hours to shoot, and 15-20 hours to edit into the three and a half minute movie you see here. This video also includes about 3.5 minutes of credits and outtakes for a total of nearly seven minutes.

Needless to say – I wasn’t ready with the final product until the aforementioned “future” sleepover several days later. 🙂

ON WITH THE SHOW!
Enjoy – The New Benders!