We finally get to our real establishing shot midway through the scene. I’m a rebel that way. This is a straight track across the entire exterior of the minka. Here I honor the architecture by staying plumb and true.

James is still mumbling to himself, trying to figure out how a Japanese door works. Does he knock or is there a bell? Oh wait — of course. There’s a gong!

“Dey tink of everyting, dem.”

From the POV (Point of View) of our murder hornet voyeurs, we get to savor the light, the colors and the tremors that are coursing through James’ addled brain. We see a glimpse of Sushi through the panels, and tucked in the corner is a working Buddha water fountain. He appears to be contemplating why this stranger decided to trample through a peaceful Zen garden and crush an orange starfish in his drunken stupor.

Because this is an exterior shot, and during an apparent earthquake, I vibrated those Oriental lanterns for almost every frame simply by blowing on them with varying force. I feel this lent more of an organic feel to the scene rather than just putting a fan on them.

This is a pure MOCO (MOtion-COntrolled) shot of my 1:6 scale Vespa with sidecar. My wife bought this prop for me for our anniversary, because we love riding our Vespa.

Here we surmise the homeowners are into potted flowers and bad-ass scooter helmets. And once we pan to the license plate, we get our first hint that this film is going to be NSFW.

Those flowers, by the way, are handcrafted in Thailand out of plasticine modeling clay. The details are incredible.

Here we introduce Amanda & Sushi’s house, known in Japan as a minka. As James enters their world, we slowly fade in some color. This will be a theme throughout, to reinforce some generational and cultural contrast between James Bondáge and the contemporary characters he’s about to meet.

This was the first set I built specifically for this film, after being inspired by traditional Japanese architecture. Because my studio is tiny, most of my custom sets are 2x4x2 foot boxes constructed from plywood with removable walls, either painted or covered with tiled textures printed on paper.

The minka’s translucent rice paper sliding panels are backlit, which really makes the scene work with the color palette I designed. All the props you see were carefully curated for scale. The ceramic work on the patio is a fantastic test piece I bought from an old neighbor for $60. The cherry blossom tree is plastic, which drives home the very nature of this alternate universe.

POSERS is a prop-driven film. That means during a year of writing the script, if I could find an intriguing prop, I tried to find a way to write it into the story — no matter how absurdly.

And yes, those are giant murder hornets buzzing about. They were extremely difficult to animate because they kept falling apart! More on them later…

This was the first shot I did in POSERS. I thought it would be just an experiment to get the feel for animating these Phicen bodies, but the first take came out good enough to keep.

An aging James Bondáge ambles into frame, does a double-take at the camera, draws his gun and fires. But then he collapses from an apparent heart attack.

The 1:6 walker was custom made by NorthernLightsMinis, and I added the tennis ball feet from a plastic necklace I sourced separately.

I animated James falling solely by balancing his body, without any rigging. That wasn’t easy on a 24” round mirror floor, but it came out way better than I thought. When he flings the walker away, I did that by suspending it from green fishing line and then Photoshopping the lines out in each frame.

My original script called for James to fall through the moving matte hole, and virtually into the viewer’s lap, and then get dragged around a bit. But to do that, I realized too late that I should have printed and cut a physical matte to perform that trick with actual physics rather than try to fake it all in Final Cut Pro. Maybe someday I’ll redo it that way?