Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 6) DV UPDATE Eric Tozzi sets up a low-angle shot with his Panasonic AGDVX1000B. AN EXPLOSIVE SERIES A HARROWING NARRATIVE, THE DIRTY BOMB DIARIES BROUGHT DRAMA AND SMART PRODUCTION TECHNIQUE TO THE WEB. BY JAY HOLBEN I nspired by the success of the Internet series LonelyGirl15, Los Angeles writer Sean Hinchey imagined what a series might be like if a LonelyGirl-like character found herself in a perilous situation. “I was reading about terrorism in other countries and the devastation of things like Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami that hit Indonesia,” explains Hinchey. “I was thinking of doing a story about one person struggling to survive and cope in that kind of situation, and I thought, ‘What if a dirty bomb went off here in the States?’ How would an individual react to that?” Hinchey conceived The Dirty Bomb Diaries (www.dirtybomb diary.com) as a fictional blog about a young girl in the aftermath of a dirty bomb detonation in Los Angeles. He took the idea to his longtime friend and co-collaborator, writer, editor and director Eric Tozzi, who immediately suggested that they format the blog for an online series instead. “When Sean brought The Dirty Bomb Diaries concept to me I thought, ‘What if we explore this differently, and do it as a Webcam vlog [video blog] and tell the story of this character trapped and isolated after this event, emoting and talking about what you do when basic needs like water and power are taken away?’” remembers Tozzi. Hinchey then went off after that meeting and started to write scripts for a planned 28-episode series, basically covering each day of a month in the character’s life after the dirty bomb went dv july 2008 off. In the two weeks that Hinchey was writing the series, Tozzi put out a casting call for their heroine. “I looked at what we would need for this series,” Tozzi explains. “I already had the camera, I had my own editing suite, we needed a really good actress and we were set to roll.” Tozzi got several responses to the casting, and he and Hinchey met face to face with the hopefuls at a Starbucks in Santa Monica. As it turns out, Misty Van Cleve, the first actress to walk in the door, blew the duo away. ”Misty just got into it right away,” explains Hinchey. “Even before I finished telling her the idea she started asking all the right questions, and we knew she was the one.” With their primary cast in place, the filmmaking duo set a schedule that encompassed four shooting days spread out over a couple weeks. Although the series was designed to be 28 episodes, the team quickly found that they could compress the timeline considerably and get the information across much quicker than they had originally planned. “We shot seven episodes on the first day, and then another five episodes the next weekend,” recalls Tozzi. “We found right away that we were moving pretty quickly through the character development aspects as Misty would run through the dialogue and kind of compress what I had written into a more succinct fashion,” adds Hinchey. “We also found that as we were cutting the episodes together, things were moving www.dv.com 6 http://www.dirtybombdiary.com http://www.dirtybombdiary.com http://www.dv.com
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