Everybody Wants to be a Superhero was written in one night in November 2006. We started pre-production in January of 2007. We made all of the props and costumes ourselves. The costumes (shirts with the superheros' 'CC', 'CB', and 'CG' logos and capes) were inspired by comic book heroes like Batman and Superman. The Captain Comet comic book was designed in Photoshop and certain pages and the front and back cover pages were attached to a real comic book to give the fake comic book the weight, feel, and look of a real one. The wall mounted computer panels were made from scratch using things such as pipe cleaners, colorful buttons, cardboard, and foam. Even Mr. Malice's Deactivation Ring, a simple ring with an oversized purple gemstone, was made from scratch!
The shoot was done on three separate days all at Crockett High School. On the first day we shot the opening scene where Felix, the nerdy boy, is introduced and is transformed into Captain Comet. It was a rather uneventful scene to shoot. The next scenes we shot were in Mr. Malice's evil fortress of doom AKA Crockett's French classroom. The walls were covered in colorful fleece blankets and the handmade computer panels. The room was completely transformed and (in my totally unbiased opinion) looked amazing, especially with the very cool lighting! This was the part of the shoot that was long, mostly because there was a lot of tricky dialogue in the script (sorry to any of the actors who are reading this!) and there was a fight scene.
Some of the things that happened on set during the fortress scenes were really funny! One was the locked door. Captain Comet and his trusty sidekick Comet Boy were about to enter the inner sanctum of Mr. Malice's fortress to rescue Comet Girl. All the actors had to do was open the door and come into the room. Not too hard, right? We had forgotten to check if the door was locked. The crew and the camera were inside the room and the actors were out in the hallway waiting for their cue, so when it was time for the actors to come in the room they couldn't (although they did try). We all got a big laugh out of that, especially since in the script right before they were to come into the door Mr. Malice was listing off all of the traps he had set up around his fortress that would stop Captain Comet. (I guess you had to be there to really appreciate how funny it was). The fake punches during the fight scene were also fun to watch (yes, they're fake punches! We didn't have the actors actually beat each other up.).
On a different day we shot a couple pick up shots: some dialogue was reshot, some continuity issues were solved, and there was the close up shot of the feet walking by that opens the film. Everyone who was on set that day (apart from Abigail who was working the camera) got to walk back and fourth in front of the camera a couple times. You can't tell that the a couple feet are the same when you first see the film! I'm very pleased with how that shot came out.
On the last day of filming we shot a scene where Captain Comet and Comet Boy face the evil hydrominion (AKA minion with a big water gun). Nice easy couple of shots to get. The we shot about 15 minutes of the Comet guys running around. We needed about 10 seconds of running to put on the screen in Mr. Malice's fortress. Thanks to the actors for running around so much without complaining at all!
Editing went smoothly. The hardest part was finding music that we could use without being sued over rights! We got some off of freeplaymusic.com and it works well (it took a couple days of listening to a lot of 30 second clips to find the perfect ones for our short). Then there were the sound effects. They were mostly time consuming. We added all of the punching sounds in the fight scenes manually and all of the lazer, button, shooting, sci-fi sounds as well.
I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out and I hope everyone who worked on the project had a fun time!
Thanks. 
Thanks to the whole cast and crew of Everybody Wants to be a Superhero! Abigail, Mr. McLaughlin, Martin, Jonathan, Kassidy, Patrick, John, Sue, and Jim!
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