The Cursed Army Ball Video (2005)

Well, here it is: The 2005 Army Ball film.  Although I’m no longer in the Army, my old unit asked me if I would make a film for the 2005 Army Birthday Ball.  Since I don’t get paid to do anything, I agreed to do it for a ticket to the ball.  Scott Douglas wanted to try his hand at acting in a leading role, and I though this would be a perfect opportunity for him, especially since he was still in the Army at the time.  

A lot of scenes in the movie have funny stories around them.  The scene where two soldiers take off in a Honda swinging a baseball bat out the window was written solely for the purpose of putting the theme from Magnum P.I. somewhere in the film.  Another funny side story to this movie is the scene with Major D swinging a lightsaber around like the kid in that Star Wars Kid video.  He didn’t like my Army Ball video from the prior year, and he kept asking us when we were going to put him in this year’s film with a lightsaber, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for revenge.  I told him to just swing the lightsaber around, and we would add the special effects in post—including CGI bad guys that he’d be fighting.  To top it all off, we told him he needed to make the lightsaber sound effects with his mouth so that we would know where to add them in post.  Owned! 

No hard feelings, though; it was all in fun, and quite frankly made for a pretty damn funny scene in my opinion.  The rest of the film is pretty funny as well.  This also marks the first film I’ve mixed in 5.1 surround (available on DVD in early 2006) using Sony Vegas video editing software.  Vegas, by the way, is the best video editing software I’ve ever used—and I’ve used Avid, Final Cut Pro 5 HD, Adobe Premiere, Ulead Media Studio Pro, and a slew of others.  The film also has a pretty nice look to it, especially considering we didn’t light a single shot due to our small crew consisting of myself, Drew Adams, and Anthony Cafaro.

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The Technicals:

Starring:  Scott Douglas, Christina Baumgartner, Troy Kaldor, Chuck Slayton Written by Hank Braxtan and Scott Douglas Directed by:  Hank Braxtan Director of Photography: Drew Adams First Assistant Director: Anthony Cafaro Release:  June 10th, 2005 Length: 00:11:26 RATED PG