"Summer's Too Short" Now On-line

After more than a year in the making, my new short movie, "Summer's Too Short" is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk4tVFfgSP4

I began work on "Summer's Too Short" on March 12, 2014. I took a single photo of my garden every day until December 9, 2014. Over the last month I have compiled these photos into a short movie.

I did a couple of posts on my blog about the movie:

<i>“Summer’s Too Short”</i> Should be Done Shortly http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/summers-too-short-should-be-done-shortly/

and

A Little Work on a “Short” Project http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/a-little-work-on-a-short-project/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A Little Work on a "Short" Project

I started to work on "Summer is Too Short" this week. My editing went well and I am hopeful I will get this done soon.

I shot "Summer is Too Short"  last year, but hadn't cut it together yet. It is a time lapse movie. I shot one image a day for about 9 months, which gave me about 280 images.

I didn't have a time lapse video camera, so I used a still camera. About a third of the way through, my still camera stopped working. I borrowed my wife's camera for the rest of the movie.

I hand held the camera, so the images jump around quite a lot. I expected this, but since I had to deal with a similar problem with "Contingency" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sPbUoD9zM), I felt confident that I could work around it.

I use Premiere Pro to edit the movie. I imported all the images and added them to a time line. The process I followed to line up the images was to over lay one image on either the previous or following image. I made the top image semi transparent. I used the motion controls to get the images to line up.

The adjustments were rather tricky, but I got better at it as I did more. I found it more difficult to deal with images that were at a different angle. Again, I have gotten better at  that kind of adjustment.

I am about half way through aligning the images, so I think I'll have that done next week. However, some of the images will need some colour or brightness adjustments once I have them aligned.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 3

In this and the next few posts, I will look at how I made some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.

Who Shot the President started out as an idea for a feature film. The idea came to me after I had seen one too many documentaries on the Kennedy assassination. After I played around with the idea for a while, I realized I wasn’t ready to make a feature.

Rather than abandon the idea though, I asked myself what was the point I wanted to make. What I wanted to say was that most conspiracy theories base their argument on a logical fallacy. I reviewed all of the scenes I’d come up with and picked one that would make that point.

It took me longer than I expected to make this film. Although I shot it twice before I was happy with it, the hard part came in developing the idea. I did a fair bit of research to find appropriate images to use. I used a series of still images for most of the film. I did have one short “live action” segment in the film. Years later, I learnt that Chris Marker used a similar approach for La jetée.

I use regular tripod, and put my images on the floor. At first, this worked well, but as I moved to shorter and shorter clips, I realized that it required about 2,000 deep knee bends. I wasn’t a fan of deep knee bends to start with. But, I got it done. Later when I redid the film on 16mm, I used projected slides to make it easier on my knees.

The sound track was an interesting challenge. I had two actors to play the parts, but couldn’t arrange them to be in the same place at the same time. I used an old two track reel to reel tape recorder, which allowed me to record one track at a time.

First I had Michele L record her lines, with gaps for the other actor’s lines. Then I had Steve Hanon record his lines while he listened to Michele L’s recording. We ran into a problem when some of the gaps were not long enough for Steve’s lines. When we played back the recording, it sounded like she interrupted him several times. Steve could have talked faster to fix that, but we decided that the interruptions worked well, so we kept it as it was.

The final touch was to add an echo. The recorder’s playback head was after the record head, so I could feed the recorded sound back into the recording. The sound turned out rather muddy, but years later when I redid the sound for a 16mm version of the film, the better quality sound equipment produce a sound that was too clean, so I used some of the original sound.

This was one of the more successful of my films and I got a lot of good feedback on it. I also got a lot of very negative feedback. I talk about that in an article I wrote: Why Do People Hate my Film?

In my next post, I will look at The Fence, the film I made for the fifth festival in 1996.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

How to make a Film for the Hundred Dollar Film Festival - Part 2

In the next few posts, I will look at how I made some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.

I made Weekend in Calgary for the first Hundred Dollar Film Festival in 1992. This was a film that kind of just happened. I wanted to have a film in the first festival, but I was stuck for an idea.

One of the Super 8 cameras the CSIF had an Intervalometer. That is, it could be set to take a picture at intervals of 5 or 10 seconds. Out of curiosity, I wanted to try it out. At the time, I did not intend that this would become a finished film.

One Sunday, I set up the camera in my car and drove out to Lake Louise and back. Because of the length of the trip, I used up a bit more than half of a roll on the way out, so I switched to another roll for the trip back. I had to finish off both rolls later before I could get them processed.

At noon the next Monday, I went for a walk during my lunch break and ended up at Olympic Plaza where a local band was playing. For one of their original tunes, they had lifted a guitar riff from Pipeline by the Chantays. Pipeline was one of my favourite tunes from my childhood days. As I listened to the music I thought that Pipeline could work well with the film I’d just shot.

At the time, I knew many people in Calgary who, after a hard week at work, would rush out to Banff to “relax”, then rush back to work. I thought it was an odd thing to do, but it reflected the “go go” attitude that many people had at the time. That led to the title of the film. Now, with a point to make and music to go with it, I thought I had a film.

There were a few more hurtles before I was done. First, I would need sound and I had shot on silent film. My solution was primitive. I cut the two sections of the film together. Then, I used a sound camera to shoot the projected image. That proved to be a little trickier to do that I thought, but eventually I was happy with what I had.

I dubbed Pipeline onto the magnetic stripe. The film went on to win the award for consistent vision in the festival. Although we only screened the film a few times, years later people would still talk to me about it.

Years later, after I found out what it would cost to get the rights to use the music, I asked James Reckseidler to do a new tune for me. If I had to pay money for music, I’d rather pay a local filmmaker than a faceless corporation. I used his music for the version of the film I posted on YouTube.

In my next post, I will look at Who Shot the President, the film I made for the third festival in 1994.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog