Community Project

NickClapper

NickClapper

My greatest regret, during my time on IndieTalk, has been my failure to get a community project off the ground. We came pretty close with the organ lottery project, but it never quite worked out. The past few days has seen a new member trying to get another community project off the ground, but is, I suspect, going to fall into a number of inevitable traps.

I am currently studying for the final exams of my academic career (*sob*) so am just sitting in libraries all day, every day. I'd like something to break it up a little bit (in addition to the couple of projects I am, slowly, working on). So I've come up with a new way to do a community project.

If you would like to participate in this project as a director (or in a shooting capacity), I need the following information out of you:

What actors are at your disposal? [i.e. two men and a woman]
What locations are at your disposal? [i.e. a house, a bar, an abandoned quarry]
Can you record decent quality sound? [i.e. yes]
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Please be conservative with your responses. In order for this project to be realistic and work, I need to be sure that people can (and will) shoot their scenes in the allocated manner.

Once I have a bunch of participants, I will go away and write a short script that incorporates these various shooting units into a single coherent story. I will ensure that no member has more than a maximum of two days shooting (though generally will try and keep it to what can be done in a single day). If you cannot record decent quality sound, I will give you no dialogue to shoot. Everything will be kept as simple as possible (within the constraints of a very tricky project!) so that we have the maximum chance of success.

Additionally, if you are not willing to direct (or arrange the production of) a shooting unit, there are loads of other roles that are required:

Composer
Editor - individual units should edit their scenes but a central editor will put it all together and try and ensure that the editing matches throughout.
Post-sound
VFX - will not be VFX heavy, but we can incorporate some if there's someone who can supply the talent.
Marketing - with so many cooks, would be great to have someone responsible for pushing the film.
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In order to make this attempt as successful as possible, I will only accept forum regulars into the scheme. New members (and I'm talking people who've only been around a few weeks) are welcome to input and help out, but it is of paramount importance that I know people will stick around and see their unit through to completion.

The deadline for signing up is 18th April 2014, giving people two weeks, after which we will allocate two months (and a bit) to complete production of your scenes, meaning a shooting deadline of 30th June 2014. As I have said, should be no more than a day of filming over the course of two months, so if you can't commit to that then please don't!

I really hope this works, and I think it can. Let me know if you have any thoughts and get signing up!

Current units:
David.rhsc (San Francisco, USA)
cheeseandachallenge (Wellington, New Zealand)
Cracker Funk (Richmond, USA)
wheatgrinder
Flicker Pictures (Boston, USA)
mad_hatter (Birmingham, England)
Dreadylocks (Omaha, USA)
Lucky Hardwood (New Orleans, USA)
ChimpPhobiaFilms (Ohio, USA)

Fence-sitting-maybe-merchants:
WalterB
Dreadylocks
sfoster
mad_hatter
ChimpPhobiaFilms
ItDonnedOnMe
jax_rox
Flicker Pictures

Music team
JoshL
mike mcguill

Sound team
mike mcguill

Sound maybes
AudioPostExpert
Alcove Audio

Marketing maybes
RayW

And remember to fill in this form if you want to have a shooting unit in the film!

(Of course, if you're local to an existing unit, why not team up?)
 
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Wheaty, is our VFX dude out? I could potentially ask around to see if anyone is available? My DP has played a fair bit with VFX, though it's not really his area, and I half know of a few people that could maybe work. These are all people who could maybe help and maybe be good enough

Dreadylocks said:
I apparently have 'unlimited disk space and bandwidth' though reading through the ToS it does prohibit using the shared server space as 'storage.' Not sure if this really qualifies as that, but I think we all should be good as long as CF can download the media in a timely manner.
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Yep well if you're ok with that, I'll PM you once I am in a position to upload my footage. Again, being in NZ it's likely to take quite a while to upload (and I imagine being 60gb will take anyone a while to DL) but I presume if it's there for less than a week it's ok?

Cracker Funk said:
60gb, wtf?! Did you shoot on an Alexa? :lol: No worries, we'll figure it out. Congrats on the shoot, C&C! Good job, it looks nice. :)
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Hah no, Gh3 :P We ran each take quite long. Things that would probably normally just be a cutaway would be run as an entire scene for hte sake of extra coverage. And since we were shooting on a glidecam, we couldn't use an external monitor (can't balance with an HDMI cable, and didn't have a wireless solution available) there is a fair bit of test footage and rehearsals in there too - my DoP would do a test shot, then we'd play it back to make sure it was as I wanted. Pretty frustrating and inefficient process. Will need to invest in a monitor. But I may be overestimating with how much will be left once I get rid of test shots and so on.
 
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Shot yesterday.
We started with some delay and out of the blue the sun was all cloudy halfway, but we got the whole scene covered. Although we had to skip some shots due to time pressure.
The location had an unpleasant surprise: a half finished folly was constructed on the spot we wanted to use, so my floor plan had to change a little bit.

I haven't looked at the footage yet, but it fitted on a single 16GB SD.
We shot with a C100 on a shoulderrig.

We also recorded some extra sounds.
 
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WalterB said:
Shot yesterday.
We started with some delay and out of the blue the sun was all cloudy halfway, but we got the whole scene covered. Although we had to skip some shots due to time pressure.
The location had an unpleasant surprise: a half finished folly was constructed on the spot we wanted to use, so my floor plan had to change a little bit.

I haven't looked at the footage yet, but it fitted on a single 16GB SD.
We shot with a C100 on a shoulderrig.

We also recorded some extra sounds.
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Awesome Walter. No shoot is ever as simple as it should be on paper, but it sounds like you've done a good job.

I look forward to seeing some screengrabs of what you shot!

re:the issue of transferring data – Can we set up an FTP transfer using Dready's (or anyone else's) server space?
 
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NickClapper said:
Awesome Walter. No shoot is ever as simple as it should be on paper, but it sounds like you've done a good job.

I look forward to seeing some screengrabs of what you shot!
....................
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It's like waging war: you can plan, plan, plan, but was the battle starts things go totally different ;)

I'll post something as soon as possible.
Offcourse I already took a look. Framing as 2,35:1 seems to work pretty well.
The footage is not as perfect as I would want it to be :P
And it seems I have to shoot 1 extra shot with 2 of the actors for the edit to make sense: like I said the floor plan got messed up. The solution wasn't completely perfect.

It's going to be alright :)
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
Yep well if you're ok with that, I'll PM you once I am in a position to upload my footage. Again, being in NZ it's likely to take quite a while to upload (and I imagine being 60gb will take anyone a while to DL) but I presume if it's there for less than a week it's ok?
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Yeah, I'm not really worried about it. I just went looking to see if I had any caps and ran into that. So yeah, we're gravy, just let me know.


AudioPostExpert said:
I never got a response to this post #319. The offer is still open but understand if you want to keep it all under one roof, so to speak.

G
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I'd be cool with sharing the load, as long as CF doesn't mind having to deal with more than one FTP login.
 
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AudioPostExpert said:
I never got a response to this post #319. The offer is still open but understand if you want to keep it all under one roof, so to speak.

G
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Ah, awesome, sorry completely missed that.

Yeah, that sounds like a great offer, thank you. When we reach that point, I guess it's up to what's most convenient for the unit directors and CF (as well as those with the server space).

Does it make sense for C&C and Walter to transfer their footage immediately? Or would it be better to hold off until the rest has been shot?
 
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Hey,

Im not going through 30 pages of this forum but love idea of working on a community project. If you need help with VFX of VFX clean up etc i'm up for helping out :)
 
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Jooble said:
Ok cool so a UFO on some viral video footage, I can do that :)
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Ha, yes Tom that'd be awesome!

I know that Wheat has been quite busy with things recently, but I think we're gonna run with the elk footage if that can be done. Let me know if you have any questions/queries/concerns, and thanks so much for stepping in (once again!).
 
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Awesome Jobble!

And nice work Walter. I haven't contacted any press here yet - I was thinking it may be better to hold off until there is a bit more of an established marketing plan and social media presence, and we were a bit closer to a premiere - but I can start now if wanted?
 
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I suggest to get the news about the shooting out rightafter shooting: then it's still new news.
Closer to the premiere it will be news again :P

By getting coverage the project becomes more 'interesting'.
Once the blog has more content. Hopefully in the next week or 2, I'd say we try to get some attention on 'no film school' as well. :)
Just need to figure out the right angle to make it an interesting story for them.
 
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Cool cool. I'll get in contact with the uni magazine, local press, my old town's press (I grew up there, so will still be relevant) + NZ film blogs/websites over the next few days. I've only really promoted myself once before - any sort of recommended approach? I was thinking of sending out a general enquiry, then if they're interested, giving them a press release of sorts. Or is it better to give them all the info at once?
 
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