Okay. The last video I posted here was Pecan Sandies. Since then we've made 4 Films (Pac-Wommaned, Perfect Snow, Winco, and Beyond Good, Beyond Evil) and removed our highest-viewing one (Perfect Snow) from the internet. Here's the stories and what we've learned!
Pac-Womanned
I can't believe I haven't blogged about this yet! Well. This was the first movie we made with my new camera (excluding Pete's Christmas, of course). You can hear me breathing and a lot of the shots have absolutely horrible framing BUT there is finally movement (we're not stuck on a tripod anymore!) and its in 1080p so yeah.
Also, I used Premiere Pro CS5 for the first time in one of our films (recap: The Fridge was in Final Cut Pro X, Pecan Sandies in Final Cut Express) which was a highly enjoyable experience and I don't think I'll be turning back.
Two things were learned from this one. How to move a camera with the action (harder than it seems) and a new editing workflow.
Perfect Snow
This was by far our best film. It is on longer online (read below) but it was honestly our best (looking) yet. Color grading was really good, framing and camera movement really worked, some (really cheesy) special effects, and a fairly entertaining storyline made for a very good little film.
I cannot even express how sad I am I can't share this one with you anymore! It is no longer public (If you're dying to see it, you can email me) because one of the talent's parent's requested it be taken down because of the violence. Which is where we get some more knowledge: every film of ours from now on will make sure that every talent in the film has a consent and release form signed so that legally we're protected to not have to take the video down.
Winco
So we finally got to work with Michael, our filmmaking friend from Deer Park! It was his first time using my camera (his fancy DSLR might take good video but people like to hear what we're saying so we used mine) so there was some focus problems, but this is by far our funniest film. While sitting in fat daddy's writing this, we really pulled out our political humor and satirized how polarized the political environment in the United States is right now. It is by far our funniest, and working with Michael was a fun experience--look for more collaborations there sometime soon.
Beyond Good, Beyond Evil
Do you remember that little disclaimer on the opening of The Fridge? "No swear words were uttered by the cast in the making of this film." Well.. we couldn't say that about this one. This is our 50 Hour Slam piece, and man, was it a fun challenge. The team was David Faust (Producer), Rachel Peterson (Executive Producer), Michael Burrows (Director of Photography), Daniel Amado (Composer) and Myself (Director). We had 50 hours to create a film which incorporated the number 50 (numerically), a spokane historic landmark (the clock tower is what we chose), and a very very very sad poem that was assigned to us.
So we are first challenged with writing a sc--hold up, theres more to it than that. We're first challenged with not being killed by the extremely sketchy filmmakers that surrounded us at the kick off event. Then, after not dying from them or their unbathed stench, we were challenged with writing a script for this sad sad sad sad "death is the end, you'll die lonely, sorry" poem. We were too artsy and came up with something with no actors dialogue, just VO of Rachel dramatically reading the poem. If we were to do it again, we probably gone with what we knew and satirized the darn thing, but we were dumb in didn't. Next Challenge.
Saturday was shooting day: We shot at David's creepy old house which had a pale yellow room (as it says in the sad sad sad poem) in it, rather luckily. A very fun day. Driving around, forgetting candles, getting snacks at yokes, crying at the sadness, teasing, filming weird things, etc... it was fun. We finished shooting. We ate at stop and go drive in (which I really should write about at some point). I threw a rough cut together so we could go to Daniel's and record Rachel's Voice Over (VO). Then everyone went home and I was left with the task of finishing things, sending it to Daniel to compose to, then burning to a DVD and turning it in.
Daniel got the music Sunday afternoon, and, after some struggles, got it to me and we were done with that. It was really cool working with original music, it made the film that much more personal and unique, knowing the music was specially crafted for our movie--hopefully that's something we'll be able to do again soon. I turned it in and now we wait until early may to find out if we made the top 15.
I can't actually show you the video (they have screening rights until Late August when the online vote is done... more on that later) right now, but my mom is working on a behind the scenes video, but its not done, so until then, here's a BTS still of michael looking crazy:
Future Projects
We have two scripts in reserve, one's a silly one about crying over spilled milk, another is a bigger, hopefully funnier and well-developed script called "The Detective" which will be rewritten and shot by this summer, Lord willing. I have an idea in my head about on other one, but it's just a bunch of sticky notes for now.
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