Community Project

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]

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.

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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Any updates from Nick and Cracker?

I haven't really been active here lately, but it would be good to get something finished for the people who worked on it.

I barely recall what needs to be done anymore. I think there was the potential for reshoots in NZ right? If so it'd be good to know soon. Several of my team from that day have moved away etc etc, the longer the lapse in time, the harder it'll be to get key people back (although thankfully my actress is still around).
 
Apologies for not helping so much guys – I'm knee-deep in development at the moment but should have more time in a couple of weeks.

FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS:

We have enough material to cut together the short film that we need. Yes, we might like a bit of extra stuff here and there, but that might never happen. Let's aim to get what we have together in a NEW EDIT.

Now I know that CF has just moved cross country and is probably super busy and this is a bad time for him. So would someone else be able to work from his original edit and refashion it into something leaner and a bit less linear? Apply here.

SECOND ORDER OF BUSINESS:

Once we have a locked off edit, we need to get people onboard for post-production. Enthusiasm was pretty high when we started this project and has waned massively. So I'm not sure where APE and Alcove are still available or interested in the sound? I also think Mike McGill expressed an interest in helping in that area, though, tbh I've not been around so much lately so I'm not sure who the regular soundies on the board are.

We'll also need a composer, and hopefully JoshL is still up for that? I think we had Will Vincent down to colour grade the final product, is that still on? And Jooble are you still around to tweak bits and bobs of the VFX?

But Walter, you're absolutely right, let's finish this baby off and not let all that hard work go to waste!
 
I'll cut it, but I can't start for a few weeks (moving house today and our Internet won't be connected till March 8).

Re Josh - unsure if he'll still be on board, spoke to him recently and he sounds very busy. But it's always worth checking in.


I agree that we should just find a way to get this thing finished, it's unfair on the people who worked for/with all of us.
 
Hi CnC!

your inbox in full, so I can't send you a message.

(Haha, this is a public announcement ;) )

To all:
I'm still busy with all kind of things, but I want to put things in motion again.
 
Oh, HI, indietalk! Walter sent me an email and I'm glad he did. My life has been a tad interesting lately. I don't want to make any excuses. I dropped the ball, period. Let y'all down. I'm so sorry for that, and stoked that y'all are still interested in moving forward.

Seeing as how I literally abandoned you, I would not feel the tiniest bit slighted if y'all thought it best for someone to take over as lead editor. But should you still want me, I'm here, and feeling rejuvenated!

Some stuff happened, both in my filmmaking life, and in my non-filmamking life, that kinda killed me inside. I had hardcore artists-block. You guys aren't the only people I let down, artistically speaking.

But I'm feeling really alive right now, so I hope y'all will take me back. My computer has been acting like a piece of shit lately. I'm upgrading to Windows 10 and crossing my fingers that that will bring her back to better health. And then I'm finally making the upgrade to CC, meaning of course that we could easily collaborate on the edit together that way (for anyone else who has it, of course).

I'm doing the Windows update tonight, and then I'll be playing with my upgraded Premiere tomorrow.

Cheers!
 
Dope, thanks for the kind words! I do still think CC is the way to go. I'll put my revised edit on there, and anyone with CC can make their own cut if they want. I dunno, I think that's how it works? I only just installed Windows 10 last night, not that it's needed for CC but my PC was acting shady.
 
I dug through the thread back to 2014 and couldn't find it. Is there a link to the raw footage?

I don't believe so. I think I'm the gate-keeper here. Are you the key-master? ;)

If you wanna play around with it, then I think CC is the way to go. There's too much raw footage for me to upload all of it. I think I have something around 180GB of raw footage, and my CC subscription allows me to have 20GB in the cloud at a time. My plan is to upload rendered footage of already-edited scenes. Last time I was active in this thread (or on IT at all), we had kinda reached a consensus that although each scene works, they should be told in parallel timelines, instead of sequentially.
 
Welcome back CF :D
Glad to hear you are back into your flow.
It seems my email came at the right time :)

Not all the scenes are parallel, I think, but yes, there has to done to intertwine it a bit more and build more tension. I'll look up some notes and see if they make any sense.
 
Okay, so how do we do this? I'm still trying to figure out CC. The editing capacities are close enough to CS5 that my crossover to this upgrade is easy enough. It's the whole cloud-collaborating thing that I'm still trying to figure out. Has anyone here done it before?

I'm thinking the best thing for me to do is to upload, onto the CC, the rough cut that is already in place. We can use that as a proxy-edit for now, make cuts to it, and then the eventual render would come from the raw footage I still am in possession of.

And who among us is wanting to take part in the CC-collaboration? Cuz I'll of course need your emails.

Seeing as how I literally abandoned you all, I'm not even slightly up-to-date on the current plan, moving forward. I've been told there's additional footage planned, other than the originally-planned opening? After posting this, I'm going to rewind a few pages to see what discussion I missed while I was sulking in my solitude (that is literally what I was doing).

Please, anybody feel free to get me up to speed. Thanks!
 
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