Banana Kombat began as a “Chase Sequence” assignment for Cinematography I.
We had to storyboard and direct our own segments of the chase.
The Banana Officers were supposed to have dialogue, but we didn’t have the time or effort for sound.
I named them Peelington and Potassium Steve, and we'd crack eachother up with these stupid names. The two glasses were my idea. Mainly because the triangle glasses came in a pack of 4 with 2 black and 2 red. The red glasses symbolize the Banana’s inner rage against society.
Alejandro wrote the intro. I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t make it for this shoot, so Simba had to shoot this scene. I had yet to learn color correcting so I just threw a black and white filter over his footage so I didn’t have to match it to my camera.
Yes, this is uncorrected, stock Canon R6, :0. I have to thank Trevon for making our shots so vibrant. He had the eye for lighting outdoors. We'd get a take and he'd watch it back and look at the graphs to see if we were overexposed.Tre wrote the parking garage scene, including the awesome weapons toss stunt. It took maybe 20 takes but it was well worth it. Just imagine how good we felt once they both finally caught it.
For the courtyard scenes we had Eamon on the storyboards, he was our best artist. We ran into campus police while filming out here, he seemed chill and let us continue with our dumb shit.
I drew the Mario Kart eyes on the Banana for extra realism. That shoe toss took a lot of takes too, but not nearly as many as the weapons.
We finally got to my storyboards, the dirty alley kill sequence. As soon as we entered the enclosure, Campus Police threw us out. We had the permits, we got them from the department head. But I guess no one gave him the memo and we had to go home. Spring break started that weekend, so I had to spend a whole week thinking about how I didn’t get to shoot the Banana Kombat kill sequence.
All cops.
Spring break ends and we're shooting that shit. It wasn’t cold out, it was bitter, freezing even.
I felt bad for Alejandro who had to shiver in just a T-Shirt while I tried to get my gimbal to balance in my giant winter coat. My original vision was to have the Bananas get covered in a comical amount of neon red blood, giallo style, but after the run in with security I didn’t want to leave any bloodstains behind. I just put the fake blood in Alejandro's hand. I brought entirely too few makeup wipes and Alejandro had to suffer further with a red 40 syrup hand.
Trevon suggested the Bananas jump at the camera, just like that one scene from Family Guy, that's just like that one scene from Office Space. When I edited it with the hyperviolent sound effects, it was so much funnier than messy blood. Theo was supposed to turn into a Banana, that’s why his clothes were left on the ground. But I forgot the banana. The project’s biggest loss.
This film has a certain purity to it. It was made at that point in film school where you think you know everything, but you don’t, and a project like a simple chase sequence becomes a calculated masterpiece. I hadn’t shot much of anything yet, I only had 1 big project, my final for Intro to Filmmaking, you’ll never watch that mess, Banana Kombat was my first masterpiece of film school. Once we learn how the industry really works, we can get lazy and lose ambition. We weren’t there yet. All we cared about was wooing our classmates with the best chase. We all had to use the same campus, but we were gonna use it the best, we so did.
Exported on March 26th, 2024.