Wednesday, August 09, 2006

More on YouTube


Ok I'll admit it. Doing videos with Windows is like fighting underwater with an octopus that's packing a dagger in each tentacle.

But I finally converted and uploaded my first mini-dv project, a short film called "Grace."

Back in 1999 I finished The Hollywood Film Institute bursting with optimism, thinking I was hot on the heels of other HSI alumni like Spike Lee and Quentin Tarrantino.

So I wrote a script and shot the first version of Grace with a Hi-8 camcorder, got excited enough with the results to move up to Canon's XL-1, and re-shot the entire piece.

The only footnotes worth adding are that the lawn-mowing scene was actually shot at high noon, the make-up scene near the end took 38 takes (seriously) before it looked "right," and even though the bedroom in the final scene looks dark, it was brighter than daylight while we were shooting because I used something like 5000 watts of tungsten lights.

(And I never used the on-camera mic again.)

YouTube limits video length to 10 minutes, so I split "Grace" into two parts ...

Grace - Part 1
Grace- Part 2

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