But probably the best part of it all was developing my film pitch with a Tribeca film mentor, and although I didn’t win one of the prizes, my mentor Sean McPhillips was incredibly helpful in helping me to formulate an idea for a movie that I am now starting to make. Through the program, we met twice to discuss how to craft my movie idea into something worth making – and I feel like the idea I have now is really great.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to be making the movie, currently called “Connect”, and hopefully filming this weekend! I’ll post more on it later.

This past week has been pretty awesome for me. At the beginning of last week I started the main part of the Tribeca Film Fellows program. We’ve been going on field trips and tours all over the city, learning all about the film business and filmmaking in general. Starting last Monday, and the 19 other film fellows met the Vice Presidents of Development, Marketing, and Press at Miramax. Then, on Tuesday we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and then we got to shoot on 35mm film at Panavision.

The next day we got to see the footage we had shot, and saw it color corrected in a super-duper-expensive film development studio, and met David Koepp – the writer of Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones 4, Ghost Town (with Ricky Gervais), and tons of other movies. On Thursday, we went to the Mayor’s Office of New York and learned all about how to acquire filming permits in New York City, then met Jane Rosenthal, who co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert DeNiro. On Saturday, we saw a sound mixer put together the sound effects and music for a TV trailer, complete with all the big bangs and booms you don’t know you know so well.

So, after all of that, I’m sure you can imagine that it was sort of a let-down yesterday when we all just had a quiet dinner and got some cool goody bags containing some NYC-related DVDs, and some books about filmmaking. Oh, and we also met some random actress named Natalie Portman and each got a personal copy of some piece-of-crap $1300 software called  Final Cut Studio. Here’s hoping that the rest of the program will be more exciting than last night was…

HOW AWESOME IS THAT????? Woww I’m so excited… this has probably been the coolest week of my life. The whole Natalie Portman thing we knew in advance but the Final Cut Studio was a complete and utterly awesome surprise. THIS IS SOOO COOL….

Again, I’m very sorry Peter and Maraika, and I hope you like it!

]]> http://www.netsua.com/blog/the-seamonster-movie/feed 1 http://www.netsua.com/blog/alien-attack-movie http://www.netsua.com/blog/alien-attack-movie#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:14:20 +0000 Austen http://www.netsua.com/?p=1425 I guess it’s pretty sad when my Uncle Bob posts about a movie I did almost a week before I actually get around to posting it on my own blog myself. But here it is anyway. It’s sort of  a pseudo-cartoon I did using keyframing in Final Cut Express. It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece or anything but I think it’s fun enough. (Be sure to click on HQ in the YouTube box to view in high quality!)

I “designed” the spaceships myself with some textures I got online. Pretty much everything else I found online – all the backgrounds are from me google-imaging the 100 different variations of “new york city skyline”, and I downloaded all of the explosions for free from Detonation Films – they have a collection of free and paid sparks, bangs, and explosions that you can superimpose onto videos with Final Cut – which is what I did. Both pieces of music are from the soundtrack for the movie 28 Days Later. (Amazing movie by the way)

Reviews!

Note: During intereviews sound quality was low and quotes in [brackets] are my best estimation at what was said.

“Why do you always have to make movies about killing people [and really awesome things]?” – Deri Reed
“I like how you could see the aliens in the window of the space ship, that was [a fine example of filmmaking at it's best].” – Ira Saltz
“The sound effects are awesome and make this work [one of the truly genius masterpieces of our time]” – Uncle Bob

Basically it’s a 2-month long program where kids aged 15-20 are a part of the process behind the Tribeca Film Institute, filming footage for a a piece that will appear, going to screenings and tours of all sorts of movie-related places, and lots of other cool things. I’m excited!

The Evilnator from swruler9284 on Vimeo.

Think of it as cloverfield + my dad. Music from Lost and The Dark Knight. Does that really suprise you?

And yes, there very well may be another Christmas movie when my parents and I go upstate again tomorrow. And yes, it won’t technically be Christmas, but it will be over Christmas break – so there.

But whatever. I uploaded it myself in non-HD Quicktime until I figure out a better way to do it. Just click the image below to view/download the file.

Plus this tiny portable external hard drive to hold the GBs of files that would naturally come with it.

That little thing holds 320 GB!!!! Which is sort of incredibly amazing. It’s almost as small as a flash drive, but with 100 times the space.

I also uploaded the small amount of photos that I took from Thanksgiving to a Flickr photoset, but there are very few photos as I mostly took videos.

I took the videos and pictures using my new, obviously totally awesome, digital camera! It’s a great still camera but also takes 720p HD videos, which are the videos which consist of the movie above (which unfortunately is super-compressed.) I’ll post more on the camera later.

1. Cleaner interface
The first thing you’ll notice when you visit Vimeo.com is it’s clean interface. YouTube isn’t exactly ugly, but Vimeo has a nice, colorful interface which is easy on the eyes and not nearly as cluttered as YouTube.

2. Only user-made movies
While YouTube is supposed to have only user-made movies, there is tons of copyrighted material on it ranging from TV clips to to music videos. Vimeo doesn’t have any of this – it’s all user-created, non-copyrighted video, making it a much more focused community.

3. High definition!
Vimeo lets you upload videos in high definition (up to 720p). Here’s a chart from Vimeo’s HD FAQ page showing the difference between video sizes for YouTube, a regular TV, and Vimeo in HD:

4. You can download the original video
By default, Vimeo lets you download the current video as in the format that the file was originally uploaded in. This includes HD movies, which download at a reasonable speed. This feature makes Vimeo more than just a video sharing service, it lets you archive your videos somewhere that you can easily download at a later time.

5. 500 MB a week
While YouTube limits your uploads to 100 MB a video, Vimeo lets you upload up to 500 MB a week – which is ideal for long and HD movies. So while it may take some time to add a lot of videos, they can be in a much higher quality than what you’ll get on YouTube.

I know that Vimeo will never replace YouTube, at least as long as it continues to have all the copyrighted content. But as a video-sharing service for people who like making movies, Vimeo is an awesome service, and it surpasses YouTube in that right.

Vimeo | Vimeo HD | Me on Vimeo | Wikipedia Article

So every day for the past week and a half I’ve woken up kind of early and gone to Stuyvesant high school (where it’s being held) from 9 to 3. Kind of like school – only I want to be there and the things we’re being taught I actually want to learn about.

So far it’s been a lot of fun, and not nearly as boring as these film programs sometimes end up being. Well – the lesson about how a Mac is different from a PC and the basics of Final Cut Pro was boring but beyond that I’ve actually been learning some very interesting and exciting things.

Until now we’ve only been working on small practice films, but starting this week we’re beginning work on our major project for the summer: A 5-7 minute movie that takes place in a specific neighborhood of New York City and focuses on a certain sub-topic, assigned randomly. There are 5 groups and about 20 kids so groups of 3 and 4 are each making this movie together. My group’s sub-topic is music.

We had two “pitches” – A documentary idea and a narrative idea. The staff would choose whichever one they thought was better. Our documentary idea was about street musicians in Central Park (which the staff allowed us to consider a neighborhood) and why they do what they do and what their effect is on the park.

Our narrative idea (which we like a billion times more) is about a young man living in Brighton Beach. He never pays any notice to the violin player who plays music every day on the boardwalk, which is on the main character’s way to work. But one day the musician is gone and the main character sees Brighton Beach in a completely different way. What used to seem like an exciting and vibrant neighborhood now seems dark and ugly.

I don’t want to give away the ending because – guess what – we got the narrative idea (yay!) So I guess that you’ll just have to wait and see the movie yourself then.

Anyway, yeah. As usual, although I am posting the YouTube version, I highly recommend that you watch the hi-res quicktime version (45MB) for it’s superior image and audio quality, if your internet connection and computer hardware so allow it.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUuT7hSkwqg]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGAn9A-SR9Q]

So sad!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGoD8q7KP5I]

Only 6 more days till Christmas!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcPLUtpCNqA]

(Thanks to Mr. Bennett for the prototype props)