First short

I finally wrote, shot, and cut my first short. It took me about 10 minutes to write, 4 hours to shoot, and 30 hours to cut. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8QQQwr_T4A

From there you can see my first trial with my new 550D, a stop motion piece about a jealous murderous match. Yes, match. Now the reasons that this 3 1/2 minute short took 30 hours to cut are as follows:

1. I have never edited a film before, so the next time round I will be much more adept at the process
2. I was using Sony Vegas Pro which is one of the easier to grasp but still feature packed editing packages available, but this meant (just my luck) that I wasn't able to render videos that are using the 550D's H.264 *.MOV format. I had no time to track down and learn how to use another software package, as I only found this out after an entire night of cutting, and I didn't think to render it early as a test because the preview field was so good that it was basically already rendered. This meant that on the second night of editing, I had to re-encode the files into something that Vegas was able to handle. The Internets told me to use DivX or Mpeg, so I recompressed them into Mp4 as DivX is a far more compressed codec (Mp4 will leave them the closest to the original quality). 5 hours of re-encoding later I was ready to start again. This brings us to problem 3.
3. Vegas can render with Mp4, but it struggles to work with it. My preview field was set at the lowest possible quality and yet it was unable to give me anything better than a few frames per second. When moving scenes around, there was a huge lag that wasn't present whilst cutting with the *.MOV's. This also meant that when I was cutting the dialogue scene, I could hear when a word was completed and I could see it on the audio graph but I could not see where the characters eyes or hands where. What I had to do was render each few chunks of dialogue so that I could actually SEE how smooth the cut was. This added a lot of unnecessary time to the process. Why didn't I just try it with another format? I did not have time to re-encode. I'll get into this reason later.
4. Seeing as I had to start scratch with a new file format, I lost the first and best cut, and like with anything that you have to do over, I rushed the second cut but most importantly could not remember which angles I used the first cut. (and by rushed I mean hurried, it actually took me longer thanks to point 3) This scarred the film with a few dodgy transitions which I am still unhappy with.
5. Finally, seeing as I am currently working a 9-5 office job, I sit in front of a computer for 9 or so hours a day. To come home and do the same for another 5 hours a night was excruciating. My eyes were burning into the first few hours, and I honestly had no time to rest my eyes and (god forbid) go outside for a walk. On my fourth and final night of editing, when I setup my final render for authoring, I left the house and went for an hour long walk at around midnight. I was so relieved that it was finally over though I wasn't at all happy with the final product as my first cut which I had to discard was easily the best.

The reason I rushed this project was due to the fact that I was given one weeks notice for an interview with Swinburne, to which I needed to bring a reel of footage. I had nothing to bring therefore had to create. I was restricted by time and by budget therefore wrote a piece that could easily be shot and needed few actors and settings. I wrote the script on the night I found out, filmed it two days after, and spent the following 4 nights editing. The interview was Friday morning and as I had very little sleep over that week I felt like shit but luckily went in confident and nailed it.

Finally some decent Straine horror

I completely dismissed this film upon seeing the posters on our trams; it gave me a very Twilight vibe... The quote "Pretty in Pink meets Wolf Creek" made me avoid it even further until a friend of mine told me it was a fairly decent Aussie horror. A few minutes in I knew it was more than just decent, the characters were set up brilliantly and the cinematography was nothing short of stunning. The character development is so well done at the beginning that I nearly forgot it was about to turn into a horror, and that's rare these days. When we get's into the grit of the film it is fairly disturbing, though at times it's humor tends to make it even more unsettling as opposed to funny. My one qualm about this film is although it is set in Melbourne's outer suburbs, and we do sense that the Australian setting plays a part in the film, the characters themselves however do not feel distinctively Australian. We have a boozing goth chick, a couple of metal head stoners, and these could just as easily be set in the US. Then again our cultures aren't that dissimilar to begin with :p

Whilst browsing for the film's poster I stumbled upon this:

Doesn't the font look almost the same? Anyway I do hope that films such as 'The Loved Ones' do better on DVD (as it's run at the cinemas was fairly poor). It has made it's run on the international film festival circuit and has received grave reviews, let's hope this gives first time director Sean Byrne more cred to make another beautifully shot and directed film.