Wednesday, April 09, 2008
My Work Is On TV
Full Frame was great. I'll try and post a detailed recap of everything on my film blog within the next week or two, but it'll have to wait until after this week, since I'm insanely busy - to give you an idea, I just pulled an all-nighter writing some articles for the paper and getting some recordings ready for the podcast. I've got a paper due tomorrow on a book I haven't read, and a paper due Friday that I'm really not looking forward to writing. Fun times.
On a lighter note: as some of you know, two weeks ago I and a few other members of the Film Committee filmed a short video to promote the fact that we're bringing Cloverfield to show at the Campus Cinema. It's a marketing experiment, and an idea we had kicked around, but it turned out we ended up filming rather spontaneously the day after our meeting. I edited it together, and now it's showing on the big screen before all the films shown at the Campus Cinema. Not only that, but I just saw today that it's playing on the NC State television station, despite the fact that for some reason there's no sound. Weird. Anyways, I guess that officially makes this little 2-minute video I edited the most widely-viewed of any of my work.
I've uploaded it onto YouTube and Facebook for those of you who would like to see it. I have mixed feelings about it. All of my loose planning was pretty much thrown out the window since we randomly decided at one meeting to film it the next day. Originally, I had planned on the "party scene" to actually look like a party, with more people and whatnot. On the day of the shoot, though, only 4 people showed up including myself, so we were forced to make do with that. Also: we had originally planned on having a shot of Mr. Wolf's (the NCSU mascot) head rolling down the street like the head of the Statue of Liberty in the official Cloverfield trailers. Unfortunately, Mr. Wolf didn't get back to us in time. I also had wanted to film at night, but other people were not available at that time. So, basically, we filmed the whole thing in around 2 hours by basically just finding random people to run and scream in broad daylight and hoping that with proper editing it would turn out okay and somewhat suspenseful. Or at least, suspenseful in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Considering what I had to work with, I'm pretty proud of the final product. I worked on editing this thing for probably much longer than I should have, but it was fun and I wanted to make sure I got it as close to perfect as I could. It was shot on a Canon XL1 camera that I had rented from the film department - I LOVE THIS CAMERA. Seriously, it's the best camera I've ever used, and the uncompressed footage I have on my hard drive is the crispest and prettiest I've ever had to work with. It also comes with a good microphone, so this also has the best sound quality of anything I've ever filmed. The challenging part was all the other sound; namely, any sound effects and music other than the dialogue that needed to be edited in. I'd estimate at least 90% of the sound is stuff I found and did my best to mix together in an effective way.
Anyways, it played before all the screenings at the Campus Cinema this past weekend, and I've heard the response was very positive. If we end up getting a lot of people for Cloverfield, this may be the kind of thing we do for other films in the future. I hope that's the case, I had fun with this, despite the very unprofessional day of shooting. Here it is for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure). For a look at the original product we were attempting to parody, go here.
On a lighter note: as some of you know, two weeks ago I and a few other members of the Film Committee filmed a short video to promote the fact that we're bringing Cloverfield to show at the Campus Cinema. It's a marketing experiment, and an idea we had kicked around, but it turned out we ended up filming rather spontaneously the day after our meeting. I edited it together, and now it's showing on the big screen before all the films shown at the Campus Cinema. Not only that, but I just saw today that it's playing on the NC State television station, despite the fact that for some reason there's no sound. Weird. Anyways, I guess that officially makes this little 2-minute video I edited the most widely-viewed of any of my work.
I've uploaded it onto YouTube and Facebook for those of you who would like to see it. I have mixed feelings about it. All of my loose planning was pretty much thrown out the window since we randomly decided at one meeting to film it the next day. Originally, I had planned on the "party scene" to actually look like a party, with more people and whatnot. On the day of the shoot, though, only 4 people showed up including myself, so we were forced to make do with that. Also: we had originally planned on having a shot of Mr. Wolf's (the NCSU mascot) head rolling down the street like the head of the Statue of Liberty in the official Cloverfield trailers. Unfortunately, Mr. Wolf didn't get back to us in time. I also had wanted to film at night, but other people were not available at that time. So, basically, we filmed the whole thing in around 2 hours by basically just finding random people to run and scream in broad daylight and hoping that with proper editing it would turn out okay and somewhat suspenseful. Or at least, suspenseful in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Considering what I had to work with, I'm pretty proud of the final product. I worked on editing this thing for probably much longer than I should have, but it was fun and I wanted to make sure I got it as close to perfect as I could. It was shot on a Canon XL1 camera that I had rented from the film department - I LOVE THIS CAMERA. Seriously, it's the best camera I've ever used, and the uncompressed footage I have on my hard drive is the crispest and prettiest I've ever had to work with. It also comes with a good microphone, so this also has the best sound quality of anything I've ever filmed. The challenging part was all the other sound; namely, any sound effects and music other than the dialogue that needed to be edited in. I'd estimate at least 90% of the sound is stuff I found and did my best to mix together in an effective way.
Anyways, it played before all the screenings at the Campus Cinema this past weekend, and I've heard the response was very positive. If we end up getting a lot of people for Cloverfield, this may be the kind of thing we do for other films in the future. I hope that's the case, I had fun with this, despite the very unprofessional day of shooting. Here it is for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure). For a look at the original product we were attempting to parody, go here.
# posted by Andrew Johnson : 4/09/2008 05:58:00 AM 
