It clocks in at around 5 minutes, 7 seconds. The judges won't watch past 5 minutes, but I made sure that the only thing past the limit mark is unnecessary credits. It took a lot of creative cutting to get it down that low. Part of me is glad it's over, but another part of me can't wait to get started cutting together the longer version, since there's a whole lot of great footage.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, considering it's a no-budget student film with non-actors. It's not perfect, but most of the flaws are small technical details that I wasn't aware of until I actually got the footage onto my computer. For example, while the lighting of certain shots looked great on the camcorder's viewfinder, when you're actually looking at it on a monitor you notice all the areas you missed.
Also: what's up with boom mics? I was under the impression that they're uni-directional, and only pick up sound in a concentrated area. That's not what happened with me. There were several points during shooting where we had to cut a take because of background noise that was getting picked up. Plus, silence in a room is different from an actual absence of sound. So with some of the interviews, I expected the only sound to be people talking. Turns out the mic also picks up "room noise." Sometimes, it can even be utilized to one's advantage, such as when we filmed one scene with the washing machine humming in the background for effect (which will hopefully come off as dramatic and not just annoying). What I wasn't expecting was that the room noise can at times be drastically different from one location to the next, even if there doesn't seem to be anything in either place making any noise. This made sound editing pretty irritating, and it's still not as perfect as I'd like.
I realized there's a crew member I've forgotten to mention on this blog. My roommate/cousin, Jim Kennedy, joined us on the shoot and helped with the boom mic. We also ended up revising a scene on the spot, and the result is that he even has a cameo in the film. He did an great job. Not only that, but he's a graphic designer, and has been a huge help in post-production. He helped out with some of the title design, and as a result that aspect of the film looks much more professional than it would have if I had done it. He's also designing a fake movie poster so overflowing with awesomeness I fully intend to print out a couple to hang up and to give to people. It could very well be the best thing to come out of this whole project. That should hopefully be finished within a week, and when it is I'll be sure to post a picture of it.
Anyways... there's not much more to say other than that. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out, though as with any film project there are things I'm kicking myself for not doing better. The red carpet big-screen showing of the Top 16 submissions is on Sunday. I have no idea if they'll inform me before then whether or not T(HA)S made it. I've resigned myself to the fact that in all likelihood, despite all our hard work, we probably won't get chosen. Still, it was worth it, and my experience working on the festival cut should come in handy when I start working on the longer version.
I leave you now with some official stills from the film:
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