Wednesday, May 6, 2009

in 48hrs..

We did a 48hr video race to the Cheese Sandwich Film Festival and I'm really happy with the outcome of my project. The mystery prop was a line of dialog which I was actually pretty relieved about because I felt like it had a lot more freedom and flexibility, lending to a lot more variety to of films. So the quote was "My god, it's full of stars" so immediately I thought about filling my project with stars, i'm a pretty literal person. I knew that I had these sweet glass that created rainbow prisms around any light source, i've been wanting to incorporate them into one of my films for a long time and i thought this was a perfect opportunity! It also worked will with the digital stills because it would have been difficult to have camera movement or any videography with those flimsy little glasses, probably wouldn't have worked as well. at first I really wanted to incorporate a lot more techniques of video cameraless filmmaking but when it came down to it I had a hard time just finishing the project when it was only digital stills! I really want to get more involved with animation, i tried to do some stop animation in this project but not having a strong light or tripod made it pretty tough. That was another element of my god it's full of stars was the magazine cut outs.  I pretty much thought of that pretty soon after i read the prop, and I feel like i worked it out ok. the clips go by really fast, but I think that they interesting. I have a hard time with pacing when i am working with stills because I never know how long i should make each clip. I don't want to drag on it for too long because it's a still image and it's static but at the same time when i was working on my project i was really nervous of giving people headaches when they watched it because it's pretty spastic. flashhhy. the openning part of the little film was probably my favorite, that and the very end with the glasses and the street lights. the openning part that i really dug though was the shots of me eating the cheese sandwich - which actually looked pretty gross - but i like the way that the texture worked as panels kind of, it you can call them that. I want to go back and clean them up a little and maybe add some motion to them before i submit this project to film festivals, I'm curious though, are festivals pretty accepting to films that are made from just still photography? I guess, they can't be discriminating. So the next best part of this piece was the very end when i got some really crazy light efx with those glasses and the street lights. It was pretty crazy because i have just this ordinary digital camera and i was going through all the setting to see what would look best shooting at night, and there was a fireworks option and like a cityscape so I mainly went between those twoo. the thing was though that because they were night options the shutter would stay open for a pretty long time, i guess a couple seconds or something. I think that i got such sweet efx with it though was because i couldn't hold the camera and the glasses still long enough while the shutter was open, so it got really streaky and pretty awesome. I definitely wouldn't have been able to get those same efx if i was using a video camera, so that's cool. I like the idea of not knowing what you came make your film about until 48 hrs or some time limit before, i'm pretty much a huge procrastinator all the time so it i was in my element. I know i probably don't do my best when i short myself like that, but i get something done and it forces me to be creative right then so i kind of like the drama. maybe i should do that to motivate myself to make films, pick a deadline in two days and then make up some strange prop that has to be involved, i'd probably not take myself seriously though...ehh. 

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