Friday, February 15, 2008

I started editing when I was quite young...

...maybe 13 or 14 years old. I had bought an 8mm camera and made some short films. Later I upgraded to super 8mm and sound and started cranking out short 5 minute movies. My longest was 28 minutes. It took many months to edited.

I currently edited a sequence for Aftermath that took about 5 hours. It is a little under a minute and 30 seconds...and it was not fun...at first. The problem was that there are three people in the woods, Gwen, Elder Stahl and Granes. All three need to interact. Problem was as follows...

Norfleet (Granes) only had a few hours one day to shoot his three scenes. He could only do two scenes with Danielle (Gwen) where they interact. The third was shot with him leaning against a tree talking to Gwen who is seated further away from him against her own tree. However, by the time we got to Gwen's scenes, Norfleet had to leave.

A month later we shot Elder Stahl (Susie) walking with Gwen and talking to her before she is to meet with Grane.

Problem was, I was not there to shoot it and a lot of the footage is unusable not to mention that it was all shot from the same camera angle with the same camera movements walking through the same track of woods...Ted even made a brief cameo as he was seen walking next to Gwen and Susie. Susie became quite ill, tho she's doing fantastic now, and for budgetary reasons her costume was taken apart and re-sewn into another costume.

At first I was angry (this was the first time I had actually seen this footage as my computer is too slow to handle the great amount of footage we have. But then I took it as a challenge. We lost a few lines of dialog and I had to get just a wee tad artsy, but it's going to work.

I think that in the end, it might actually be better than what I originally envisioned.

6 comments:

Michael Grant Clark said...

Guess who else started making super 8 films as a kid. You really are the alt universe me aren't you.

What software are you using to edit the movie? The thing Mark used for editing the planet came on a free cd in the 90's.

Now use Final Cut Pro 5. Its a bit easier to use.

allen etter said...

Adobe Premiere 6 and Ted has Premiere CS 3. I actually used an AVID about six years ago. Loved it.


..did you ever scratch the emulsion off of the film to simulate a laser beam? I used a microscope and a really sharp needle to scratch in some lasers and then the ink from a marker to color it.

Michael Grant Clark said...

Premiere 6 is pretty solid. Its a million times better than the thing that Mark used to edit 'The Planet.' As the film is being distributed in Japan soon (yay!) Mark had to re edit the planet to take the dialogue out for dubbing - the software only had 2 audio tracks, what a nightmare!

And yes, scratching directly on film for gunshots and lasers. You are me! Or I am you!

allen etter said...

Wow...uncanny! I just got my hands on a great lap top and the movie is finally going to get edited at the speed I normally edit at. No more reading Dumas and Dostoyevsky to pass the time as my Gateway POS takes it's sweet time to render.

Ric Johnson said...

Speaking of movies when you were thirteen... Tell me this (honest question): Can you compare the diference between scratching film with a straight pin for SFX and doing it digtially? I mean the first is faster, but the second is better. But the second seems like you're more removed from the process. It would seem to be that the scratching and simuylating explosions, etc. is really more viscreal... OR are you happy to be far away from the old super-8 processes?

I know this sounds facetious (and even patronizing), but I really promise you it isn't.

allen etter said...

I am glad to be away from super 8mm. (good question by the way). I'll post a response.