Production Notes - Scene 6 - The Sergeant

Now that Lance has met his new squad-mates, it was time we were introduced to Sergeant Norfolk. I wanted this scene to be part serious, part humurous - the typical Sergeant-drills-his-recruits moment. This scene was not conceived until JazzX was tapped as Norfolk's voice. The music track "Femme Fatale" is used in the background here -- this same music is used throughout the film as a link to the Norfolk character.

My favourite line delivery takes place here: "Especially those of you who've been planting flowers in the countryside for the last year." ;)

Visual editing you may not have noticed:

• It was important to me to do my best to make sure the camera angles never betray where each character is standing, as established in the first shot when Norfolk walks in. To achieve this, I was very careful with camera angles, and relied on the notion that the barracks was symmetrical. Whenever the camera is looking "east", you see the beach sunset backdrop out the windows. Whenever is it looking "west", you see a military base backdrop.
• The shot of Devin looking out the window at the beginning is a carefully cut clip from "Watch the Horizon", with the binoculars removed.
• As Norfolk walks into the barracks, the scene switches seamlessly from "Salute Commander" to "Inspection".
• This scene contains 9 unique camera angles (and, in some cases, character assignments) from "Inspection".
• There is one shot in this scene that is actually an animated overlay! It is the shot when Norfolk exclaims "Can ya hear me?!" to Lance. This shot involved some image compositing in Photoshop. As filmed originally, the window was on the wrong side; and Corporal Devin was not in view. So I flipped the shot horizontally, and carefully inserted Devin frame-by-frame.

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