No, the title of this post is not referencing a long lost movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis.
The title describes the remaining scenes I am shooting this Saturday for my movie Streaking For The Shy.
I am about a third way through the initial cut of the movie. There’s plenty more work to be done — voiceover, music and sound effects to be recorded, transitions to be tweaked, etc.
I’m hoping I can finish up the movie by mid-October.
Thanks for any assistance.
A quick update of my progress with the short film, Streaking for the Shy.
All footage from the weekend of 08/01-08/03 has now been captured to my incredibly sexy 1 TB external HD, and I have begun the editing process.
I have spliced together the first several minutes of the movie, including the first of a series of scenes of bare-assedness. So far, it’s going well.
I have a little bit of shooting left to do, which I’m planning on completing on September 6th — I need the opening shot, a shot of some woo-woo girls, and some cutaways of the location at 37th and Loomis.
Thanks to everyone and their thoughts, well-wishes, prayers to the FSM, etc.
I sat down last night and recaptured the footage that had gone all wonkily blocky with my initial capture. This time around everything worked!
I only have a few more scenes to capture, then everything will be in my cozy little external HD.
Onward and upward,
Splotchy
I diligently logged and captured footage on the rest of Tape 1 and all of Tape 2 last night.
I connected my new 1 TB(!) external HD to my laptop via a FireWire 800 cable.
Next, I connected the camera to the laptop via a special cable. I haven’t really done any footage-dumping to a computer, so it’s a neat experience for me. I actually control the camera from the editing software I am using.
Anyways, the process of logging and capturing begins with logging the shots. Logging consists of marking start and end points of a shot, and giving it some sort of name. At this point your editing software stores the endpoints’ digital timecode (there is timecode on all the footage).
After you have logged some shots, you can then capture them. Basically, you’re giving the software a set of endpoints, and it will take these endpoints, find the relevant timecode on the tape, and capture the footage into a digital file.
Everything was working great, until my last capture session. I had logged about fifty clips and kicked off the batch capture process. The capture process has to be done in real time. In other words, if you have a ten minute clip to capture, it will take ten minutes to capture the clip. So, I let my computer chug for a while and came back to it around midnight.
Something is wonky with the last batch of footage I captured. Any motion on the screen goes blocky, mosaicy. The original footage does not look like this. I can’t use shots with this blockiness. It looks horrible.
I am relatively confident that my footage is okay, and there’s something else at play. Maybe I tried to capture too much footage at the same time, maybe my computer couldn’t handle it. I talked to Lance, who told me, based on my description of the blockiness-in-motion, that it might be a compression problem.
I’m going to review the footage again tonight, and recapture it if it still looks crappy, but do smaller batches of clips per capture.
Wish me luck, okay?
So, I went over to my friend Lance’s house last night. He showed me how to capture video footage to my computer, and also gave me some helpful editing tips.
Over the next couple days, I am planning on transferring the footage to my laptop. Shortly after, editing will commence. I still have a few more things which I need to film, and I need to do this sooner than later, but 98% of the movie is shot.
While we were messing around with the editing software, I took two of the shots, trimmed them and spliced them together. I played it back and behold! The juxtaposition of images! The magic of storytelling! The thrill of a conversation in a car!
It is absolutely pure joy seeing this movie start to come together.
Editing really suits my personality — intense concentration, attention to detail, etc. I am looking forward to assembling this movie. It will take time, but I hope to enjoy every minute of it.
I still can’t believe I’m making a movie.
Yeehaw, man. Yeehaw.
Last month I was wondering how I was going to achieve my desired broken windshield special effect.
I visited PJ’s Trick Shop in Arlington Heights after learning they had broken glass gags for sale.
Hmm, it looks a little too “jokey”
Not very big…
Well, let’s try and put it on the car. Please note that the following pics are of my rear window, as the windshield this morning was covered in morning dew. When I tested this out a couple weeks ago, I used my windshield, but neglected to take a picture.
Yes, not big at all. And the creases in the plastic look more like cracks than the cracks themselves.
You want a closer picture of this?
I still had another option. I had a discarded cracked windshield from an auto glass store. I took it from where it was leaning against my garage and set it on the ground for the night. You may or not may know this, but windshields are curved. When I came out the following morning, the weight of the curved glass not resting on the ground had snapped the windshield into two pieces. I pulled on the windshield a bit and got a small shard of glass stuck in my finger. YOWCH.
I was a little glad that the windshield was unusable. I had not wanted to try and lay it on the rental car.
So, as Freida Bee had suggested in a comment on my previous windshield post, we’ll probably add the cracks in digitally.
Here’s a pic my friend Lance quickly whipped up for me as an example:
Wow, what *can’t* CGI do?
Don’t like your job? CGI it!
Don’t like your family? CGI it!
Don’t like your president? CGI it!
I went over to my friend Lance’s house last night to look at the footage we shot for Streaking For The Shy. I had seen the first day’s footage, but had not seen Day 2 or 3.
I think it’s going to work out. There were some things I was worried about — a nighttime scene, the crash, the post-crash, etc. — but they all turned out great!
I still have a couple more shots to get, but I’d say at this point the movie is headed in a very nice direction.
More to come.
My more immediate TO-DO’s:
My new short movie is called Streaking For The Shy.
The idea was inspired by a post of Bubs (look at my comment there if’n you don’t believe me).