I’ve made a flickr account (again, why haven’t I done this before?) and uploaded some stills from the film to give y’all a peek at the way it’s looking. Enjoy!
I’m currently editing New Light Stir, a 30-ish-minute live action drama with the writer Mike Mallett, a tutor colleague from Trafford College. It’s looking pretty damn good. I’m declaring right now though that this is the last film I’ll make in standard definition DV. We shot it all on Sony PD170’s with the settings pushed as far towards ‘cinematic’ as we could – shallow depth of field, sharpness set to minimum, no gain etc . We ran a preview section of it back on a 40inch Sony Bravia and winced as it made mincemeat of our proudest shots. Still, it looks great on a CRT screen, and through a projector should be pretty good.
Mike’s sorted out actors, locations, props, wardrobe and direction, while I’ve been in charge of crew, cinematography, lighting, sound etc.
It’s been the most technically challenging live-action piece I’ve worked on to date and I’ve learnt loads along the way. At the last count there were 38 people who had contributed towards the film, giving up their time for free and generally being fantastic.
We’re pretty close to finished with the edit, with one last scene to shoot in two weeks’ time. I’m getting that familiar feeling, where you can’t view the piece for what it is, because all you can see are the little mistakes you can’t correct or ideas you had too late. But I still really, really like the way it’s looking.
My wonderful fiancee has just accepted her new job in London, which is ridiculously exciting stuff. Our time living in Manchester is rapidly drawing to a close, and yes, I’ll be very, very sad to say goodbyes. But it’s really not that far, and it’s time to step up and make new things happen.
And so, this, my new website (about time too). I need a new job in the big smoke, and a new online home on which to strut my stuff. After much consideration I decided Wordpress is still where it’s at. I could start building a new site from scratch but that seems a bit daft these days.
More soon.
I’m thinking of adding all my past projects as retrospective posts, dated at the time I was working on them, as if I’d been blogging the whole time. I’m going to date this post to yesterday (because that’s when I had this idea) to see if it works.
Over the summer I took on a freelance project for the college to update their promotional videos (originally created by Mojofuel). This involved shooting new interviews and other material, merging this with footage from the original Mojofuel tapes, creating titles and motion graphics, and plenty of soundtrack work to create 20 2-minute pieces that felt seamless and unified.
They were very pleased with the results, which are here.
This was my graduation film. I wrote the music in Fruityloops and made the visuals with Maya and After Effects. It won Best Student Film at FilMid Festival 2006, made it into the final ten in both the Music Video and Student Film categories at the British Animation Awards 2006, and screened at venues all over the country and internationally. I hope you like it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJKk1Br8ovw&hl=en&fs=1&]