Grainy, Jerky and Amateurish

So I'm intensely enjoying this Curious City film festival coming up. I plan to submit no less than six short movies, one for each category, and as I'm compiling each 60-second cinematic masterpiece I'm finding myself looking at things differently.

Now when I'm, say, motorcycling through a cemetery, and I see a giant, perfect, freshly mown grassy hill, I don't just think, "Hey, nice knoll!"

I think, "Now what could I stage there? Wouldn't it be fun to put a little camera on a tripod *here*, and then maybe get Penny and Vince to come running from over *there*... and then as they came over the crest of the hill I'd edit in a second clip of them running over the hill in funny masks, so it's like they're *chasing* themselves... maybe..."

It's fun, is what it is. Even if I never ended up actually submitting *any* movies to the festival, I'd still be glad they held it.

Last week I got to hang around a big fancy TV shoot, and while it was pretty fun too -- shooting real actors with a real camera on a real hydraulic dolly and lights on tripods and everything -- I kind of missed my little iMovies.

Don't get me wrong: a (relatively) big budget and professional production folk make for a lush, beautiful, polished, captivating result, but me and my trusty Digital Elph and Apple Powerbook make for, well, a grainy, jerky, amateurish, captivating result.

I like my movies. There's one about the world's largest water balloon fight, and one featuring some performance artists dancing in a circle wearing cardboard horse heads, and one about a quiet evening at home with Penny, and one about watching a spring thunderstorm at 3:30 in the morning. I may even make another one this weekend.

The deadline is Monday at midnight. My client's deadline, for the big fancy 30-second TV commercials, is later in the week.

I'll be in session with my friend Mike, the best film editor I've ever met, all day Monday and Tuesday, putting the final touches on the TV spots and making sure we address all the client revisions.

Sunday night, though, I'll be saving copies of my own masterworks to their final versions, crossing my fingers and uploading them to the film festival site.

Wish me luck.