December 2006

December 2006

Shooting:

So i just took a trip down memory lane. Haha. Yeah, I saw in my last December post that I stated we were doing two more days of shooting. I couldn't remember what we were shooting, so i reactivated the old Freshmenthemovie email account and found the call sheets. Man, looking back 6-7 months later shooting was a blast. anyway, we were supposed to do a lot of little stuff that wasn't important enough to shoot with the big scenes due to things like money and time. little stuff like individual character introductions for the opening montage. We ended up shooting it and it went well. The other thing we were supposed to do was shoot at the the west campus police station to wrap some things up with officer price and Derek (Steve and Josh). the police commander that was my contact for the location never responded to my emails and Steve had to end up canceling due to some conflict so we didn't get it done. That was it for shooting till February. I'll cover that in February.

Post:
So after all the work of logging, and it was a lot of work. We were editing at last. however there was the problem that the lab would be closed over the winter break. I basically lived in the lab all the time it was open for the last week of school. I had a few meetings with my professors about the project and they had me compile a dvd of examples of the work that Linnaea and Dan had done. I also put a teaser trailer online. It didn't look very good because i didn't really know how to compress the file correctly. I've since learned a little bit more about that. Anyway, the biggest problem at hand was figuring out a way to work on the movie when the lab was closed. I brought this up during one of my meetings with the professors and Crystal Griffith volunteered her office because she had a Mac Pro and Final Cut on it which was the program we were using in the lab. She gave me the keys to her office and to the building and i worked on editing the movie like a crazy man. I was leaving for Maine for 3 weeks and I wanted to make sure I had at least an Assembly edit of the film by the time i left so i had something to show to family and friends for input and feedback. Once the lab closed i stayed in her office basically almost 10 hours a day editing and it took my roughly 5 day to put a very very rough assembly edit of the film together. It was actually a very disappointing first cut. I had no clue what was going on, and I WROTE AND DIRECTED it. every thing was way to sporadic and we never spent enough time with the individual characters to really set in. but, i didn't have time to start working on a rough cut and so i burned a few copies the day before i was supposed to leave and then flew to the north east the next day. I only showed the movie to my Mom, Brother, Mom's Boyfriend, Grandmother, and Grandfather. They all praised me up and down as they would because I'm related to them. I was prepared with a questionnaire for myself to try and weed out the bias "anyone with my blood is perfect" kind of opinions. My instincts in the movie being to scattered were clear, but a new problem had arisen that i didn't realize. There was no tension from the cops. The idea of a bomb threat on campus did not come out strong in the film, and nobody had any idea that the building they keep driving by and getting into was the one with a bomb threat. I had some work to do when i got home. I wasn't scheduled to land back in phoenix till Jan 6th.