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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Yes! We must put something together – I just had a watch back and there's so much nice stuff.

Are we missing the UFO stuff? I'll email Tom who did the VFX if we need to get that off him.
 
Spoke to Tom (jooble) about the UFO footage.

Bad news: he thinks he deleted the original files in a clear out, but is going to double check on some hard drives. In the meantime the footage is available in his showreel here:

https://vimeo.com/113238940

Because it's supposed to be low quality mobile footage, I reckon we should be able to just rip it from that video. He says he's made it available for download!
 
FWIW: I found the original literal cell phone footage on my vimeo. When I shot the ufo plate footage I rigged the GH2 and Iphone 4 together to get near the same frame. I haven't located the GH2 footage yet.

UPDATE: Think I just located both the cell phone and gh2 plate footage on my ftp server. Downloading now to confirm. Doesnt have the vfx, but could be useful in editing...
 
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CF: If you don't have the time/energy to do it, it would be great to get the material to Walter, so at least he can co-ordinate the next stage. It might be too much of a pain in the arse to send him all the raw material and project files, so, worse comes to worst, you could send him the highest quality version of your current cut and he could manually enter the edit points (something we did with Spads for the grade, and it didn't prove to be too horrible).
 
We managed to send the whole project across the USA mainland and across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to me. (At least that is the shortest route.)

I sent mails/messages.
(Today: Nick & Gorilla)
(A while ago a message to Jax and C7C: haven't heart back from them yet.)

Haven't got the time to edit it now, but I can still organize getting extra footage to give it more context.
 
Long thread. Has anyone posted any video uploads of the progress. YT or other?

Hi Richard – It is indeed a long thread, and pretty much charts the history (comings and goings) of Indietalk from 2014 to 2017. So it's quite interesting to look back on.

The most advanced cut of the project is here:

PW: indietalk

I think it's really only missing the UFO video, which can be seen elsewhere in this thread. And then we were on the cusp of moving on to sound, grading and other VFX when the project fizzled out again. But a huge amount of work was put in back in the day, and it suddenly came rushing back to me this morning. Not sure if Walter still frequents these climes, but he was the driving force at the end.
 
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