The Pedissert – Vol. 9 – “Happy Inde-PIE-dence Day!”

Even though there have been a lot of good years and a lot of bad years in the 250 years of the United States of America, the Fourth of July is still an important day to me.

Because of that, I absolutely made sure I would do everything in my power to produce a Pedissert volume for America’s 250^th birthday.

Of course, you need a participant. Liz had another friend who was interested in participating. When I reached out to Shay, she was absolutely willing, and is another person who doesn’t find this weird at all. Even I, the one who smashes colorful cream pies into women’s feet for artistic purposes, admits to finding this a little bit weird.

But I digress…

For the occasion, I decided to whip up some red, white, and blue cream pies. I went back to the original Cool Whip/frosting recipe to try and rectify some of the stickiness issues I’ve had in recent volumes. I also found some red, white, and blue star-shaped sprinkles to garnish my vaguely-foot-shaped cream and crust sculpture.

Since it is Independence Day, I also wanted to include some Fourth of July facts. Using the Google machine (with “-ai” in the search string to disable the AI slop), I was able to find nine good facts. And that’s fine! I had a specific tenth fact in mind, which you will see in the video.

Everything was set to go on shoot day… when I receive a text. Due to a family member ending up in the hospital, Shay would not be able to shoot. The good news is that said family member is OK.

That being said, it led to a lot of anxiety on my end.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to postpone a shoot due to extenuating circumstances. Unlike those other postponements, I had a deadline for myself to complete, edit, and publish this volume. America’s 250^th birthday only happens once in a lifetime. Luckily, Shay was able to take part a week later.

In order to speed things up, I did some pre-shoot edit work on the video part, so I was easily able to slot the newly shot “footage” (ha ha, “footage”, get it?) in quickly. My favorite part of this particular video was that I was able to use Spektrafilm OFX for the first time. I’ve always attempted to emulate a low-budget indie film shot on Super 16, and Spektrafilm OFX made my workflow in DaVinci Resolve so much easier. I think there’s still some things I can tweak, but I liked how the color came out. The photos also came out well, and I think it’s my best “bokeh” work yet.

Admittedly, during shoot day, my mind was racing a lot and I was a little flustered – but Shay was patient, and the shoot went well.

I think the only thing I could have done better was a little bit out of my control; due to the postponement of the original shoot day, the Cool Whip was thawed, refrozen, and then re-thawed for the shoot. When you look at the pics, you can tell it got a little melty. I think the coverage and thickness could have been a little better, but the stickiness and color was still there.

Anyways, fun was had as we brought you this celebration of “Inde-PIE-dence Day.” Check out the photos and video below.

Before/After Photos From 3 Perspectives (Top/Bottom/Side)

Click on the images to see bigger images in a new tab.

Watch The “Making Of” Video!

Thanks for watching… now go shoot some fireworks!