“Do It in 72”

For the past few years, my city’s public access station, MCAT, [Missoula Community Access Television] has hosted a film contest in which they give you 72 hours to produce a short film. The catch: they give you 3 elements on Friday that have to be incorporated into the movie – so you can’t use an old film and just say you did it. The prize? $500 1st place, $200 2nd place, $100 3rd.
This was my first time entering it and I did so with a guy who I filmed my first short out of College for after answering his Craigslist ad.  ..yep..

We don’t always see eye-to-eye, and honestly I feel like he thinks he knows a lot more about film and production than he does…but at the very least his grammatical skills have vastly improved since the first film, which was a painful script to read! For this one, it was short, punchy, to-the-point. We had a possible winner! ..Then I made the mistake of using the term “horror” to describe it. It was really just a dark comedy.

We filmed for like 5 hours Sunday. The contest submission being due Monday at 5.
Rockstar? Nope.
Chips? Negative.
Crap.

It was a long night and a longer morning. But, I got it done good enough for the contest. It could’ve used some color grading thrown onto it and I discovered when I was in the theater I missed adding in a gun shot, but it didn’t really matter.
At the end of the screenings (all 26 of them! Ugh!), the pre-recorded judge (a writer for Law and Order or something) admitted that it didn’t really matter which one had the highest production value – it just mattered which one he enjoyed the most! Well, that kinda puts a kink in any creative hose. I mean I understand why, cause in a town with lots of Film/Media Arts majors (myself included), the kids who just want to do it for fun would have an automatic disadvantage to our [more or less] formal training.
Well, kids, and one guy who I actually received footage from after I was brought into a different project 3/4 the way through. He had entered the contest and would get better footage from his cell phone. He just walks around with a Handycam filming whatever, and most of the time doesn’t look like he knows the camera’s recording. *sigh*..anyway..

In my opinion, if two different stories are of the same caliper writing and characters, but one has much better production, the better produced one should at least get a mention. The point of most festivals nowadays is to show off the skills of potential and immediate-future story-tells. Is it not?

If you’re just looking to be entertained, tell us that at the meeting! Don’t have us work our asses off just to be like ‘yeah, production quality doesn’t matter’. I literally went to bed at 3am then got up, showered and went right back to work by 11am, mostly to do audio! Pretty much all for naught.

Now, I don’t mean this to be a whining of “I should’ve won!” Cause no, the winning two did deserve it. It’s more of an exploration of the evolution and different grades of film festivals.

Never-the-less and regardless of the Writer/Director’s obsessive grip on “his property”, here is our 72 Hour Contest submission.

Art by Contact

Not all art is something to paint or sculpt and stare at in a park or in a gallery. Snagged from my other blog, I decided to post these chalkboards left out on campus as a sort of bucket list of hopes for not only the persons lifetime, but for the world. 

http://reckleyrandom.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/before-i-die/

HDR and Photoshop headaches

Anyone else (not like anyone sees these) ever get a little exhausted trying to make a panoramic, sometimes? I’ve been trying to move into 360 images, and it’s not as easy as it sounds – and it doesn’t really sound that easy! Even with a tripod I still can’t get my images to connect properly. Sadly I think I had slightly better luck when I tried it with a hand-held point-and-shoot than with a tripod and my DSLR. I also did it in HDR, so I have to put the HDR set together for the whole sweep, make sure the toning lines up, then save those and put them together in a panoramic. I think it’s the tone mapping that’s giving me the most trouble. I’m using Photoshop CS5 and when I get to the shots where the sun is head-on, the grass gets darker somehow, even though I’m using a preset tone map to make sure everything is even. That makes any panorama stitcher I use derp out and either not connect anything together or place an image way out of place. Argh! I just hope I can perfect it and try to sell some stuff – or at least use it for a portfolio!

One photo – numerous possibilities

Anyone who does Photoshop work or has ever dabbled in photo editing probably knows that you can keep tweaking a picture almost forever. Especially shooting in RAW – which changes the actual pixel information rather than adding, say, more black pixels to increase contrast – you can tweak a photo and have dozens of different results, most if not all of which will be artistically interesting in their own way.

This was originally taken in color. In Camera RAW (an Adobe Bridge feature) I chose from several different black and white settings, rotated it and cropped it – all of which give it different aesthetic appearances.

Case-in-point…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As if RAW didn’t give you enough options.. I brought this into Photoshop and adjusted the ‘curve’ levels [I believe it was], until I stumbled upon one that made it look like it was on fire. Then, to get the black boarder, I went into the layer properties and adjusted the contour until I found one that fit just right.