Mr. Hell’s indieroar
my participation in this contest.
I first learned of Indieroar on Jan. 4th, what would have
been my mum’s 76th birthday. She died on Christmas eve. of
09 and I was looking to reconnect with the film and video
community after the past couple of years when most of my
time was taken up with caring and managing her needs.
I had been working on a re-edit of Mr. Hell, in the break
this past August, after I finally shut down her place and
moved the last of her things up to San Francisco. I put
it on my www.memeswar.com site. I left it alone for a
month, decided to participate in the NaNoMo contest in
Nov.(official winner) then my mum went into the hospital
over thanksgiving and I flew down to San Diego, put her
into hospice and helped her die as best she could.
I decided to start looking for things to do on her
birthday, stumbled onto this, had a do my eyes decieve me
moment and away I went.
The first thing I did was call Mike Keneally and ask
permission to use his music. He said yes and I was off.
The main difference between this version and the previous
is Mike’s music. Unfortunately, I only had a few hours to
go through his catalog and throw stuff onto the time-line
as best I could.
The editing took about a week(minus the cropping, which I
did in a day), so putting together a soundtrack and mixing
it in in a few hours was somewhat insane and Mike’s music
suffers greatly because of it. That being said, Mike’s
music rocks and I so far blows the doors off of what else
is playing in this competition – Striesand included. I’m
actually quite pleased with what I came up with and it it
helped a lot that I am familar with his music.
The cropping to a widescreen format, which as it turned
out, was something a problem, since the indieroar servers
couldn’t recognize the footage and kept squeezing it back
into a 4X3 format. I did test on youtube and it renders
out fine there, but after several attempts and different
setting, it is there in all its glory.
The other thing I did was desaturate it and turn it mostly
into a black and white project. Everything done in Vegas
Pro 9 btw.
The repeated failure to get the format correct actually
did give me confidence that I am in a legit contest, since
I spent quite a lot of time working with their tech
support.
There are many first year glitches and it looks like they were expecting a lot more entries than they got. I’ve poked around a bit and so far, no one else has put up a film maker’s blog, which is too bad, because I know I would read it. That being said, the blog writing package is confusing and frustrating to say the least.
I could see how the shroggle package could be very useful with some work, in my other life, I’m a kitty rescue guy, and I am looking for this sort of functionality.
As the old saying goes, films don’t get made, they escape.” Very true here.
