Robert Field (Editor)

Rob came to the stage armed with his "APPLAUSE" and "CHEERING" signs that he used last year to prompt the audience to yell for him. He chucked those quickly and got down to showing us some new footage:

Dem Bones
Rob had a neat tape on the battle scene between the Xena and Alti skeletons. He first showed us footage as he originally put it together. Instead of basing the skeleton effects on nothing but the computer's generation, they started with Claire Stansfield (Alti), Lucy Lawless, and the stunt doubles going through the motions that the skeletons would. Claire and Lucy set up the scene, with Claire wearing a black skin-tight outfit with ping-pong balls attached at various points. The ping-pong balls served as markers that the computer could track and map the skeleton over later. At the beginning of the scene, Alti is a skeleton, but Xena is still whole, so Claire did the scene in the ping pong outfit, but Lucy was in her shamaness furs. When Xena pulls away her face to reveal her own skeleton, Lucy drew her hands across her head, including knocking off the antler hat.

Rob pointed out something that I hadn't really noticed during the episode: Alti's skeleton is ancient and gross- looking, while Xena's skeleton looks shiny and new.

When the battle began in earnest, two stunt folks dressed in the ping pong outfits went through the entire battle, so that the skeletons could be mapped to "real" people movements. (I put "real" in quotes because the stunties were still being pulled around on wires for the hits and jumps.) Rob had notes on the screen of what effects were supposed to happen in each shot, like "Weapons magically appear" and "Alti eats the soul"

He then showed the final footage of the scene, and then the mocked-up footage and the final footage side-by-side.

Rob also showed us two scenes that were deleted from episodes last season in order to shave off time:

Devi
Eli's original magic show included "hypnotizing" a man to swallow a sword. (The actual sword swallow got used in the travelogue montage at the beginning of the episode.) Xena and Gabrielle appear to be enjoying the show, and Xena even gives the hypnot-ee a spooky "woooo!" sound when he rejoins the crowd.

The Way
When Xena and Gabrielle find Eli, he originally is doing tricks to entertain his audience. He does an illusion that turns his arm into a cobra, before he is stopped by the man whose daughter needs to be healed.

The only disappointment of Rob's presentation was that he didn't have any new bloopers for us - rats!

Return to the Pasadena Report.

	Web www.bethgriese.com