2005 Wizard Magazine Direct to Video Contest - FAN FILMS

Thanks all, I completely understand... these movies wer emade for a specific audience, and I think we all catered to it pretty well,

I myself used the following equipment

Borrowed my friends

Cannon XL-1 (wow that was a nice camera but the new panasonic HD cams are awesome)

Edited on an HP workstation got a 160GB drive from fry's for 99$ thta helped with swap space

My hp is a 2.5 Gb pentium 4

have an nvidia card

edited in Adobe premerie, Color corrected in Final Cut Pro, and did sound with Pro tools

also used shake and illusion for some basic compositing

Also it was a really horrible week for my delivery.... My cat got very sick while I was in the midst of the final editing, and passed away the day before I deliveried the film to wizard. hence the dedication to my cat... that sucked.... it was very hard.

Wow - with the computer equipment you use - one would think you would have an XL2🙂

I use a Panasonic DVC30 (little bro to the DVX100A - the major difference is no 24P) to shoot on. A Schriber 568 dual pattern shotgun mic with boom pole. SignVideo XLRPRO audio adaptor. Libec M20 tripod. For lighting - I use Snake Lights (dome with bulb - you find them in a pet store) with various watts on the bulbs.

Dell Inspiron 5100 Notebook
Pentium 4 2.4GHz
512MB RAM (need to upgrade to 1GB because 512MB isn't enough)
30GB HD for OS and Programs
160GB Western Digital 7200RPM External HD for Video
ATI Mobile Radeon w/32MB RAM
Sony 500A - External DVD Burner (4X)

I'm looking to upgrade my desktop PC to something much faster - right now my laptop is better than my desktop, therefore I'm using it for editing, until I get a new desktop. I wouldn't recommend editing on a laptop, use a desktop if you can.

Programs:
Avid XPress DV 3.5
Adobe Premiere 6.5
Adobe After Effects Pro 6.0
Adobe Photoshop 7
Adobe Illustrator 10
(all of which were used on Reality Round-Up)

Obviously my film wasn't shot so much as put together with software.

I recorded the voices, song, and sound FX using my Zoom HD based recorder (802 if I remember right) and then edited it all together, along with a few royalty-free gunshot sounds, using GarageBand on an iBook.

After finally getting it down to 4 minutes (which wasn't easy--required cutting a scene, about twenty jokes, and two characters, as well as rerecording AA's dialogue from a slower John Wayne impersonation to the final fast-talker) in Garageband, I imported the audio into Macromedia Flash, created the different backgrounds like a moving storyboard, created the characters (which, believe me, took a long time for such a South Park-level art style), and animated the thing together.

We shot a regular film (I acted, didn't direct) last week on a Canon GL2, and it was amazing what our DP did with just that and a decent lighting setup, so if I was to purchase a DV cam right now for a project, I'd probably go with the GL2. Not cheap, but a great value for the money.

Oh and for someone else who asked where the films are, let's see if I can't link to mine in-message...

Nope not yet.

Click on "All's Fair in Love and Police Actions" in my sig.

Alex.

mavic anyword on when Batfollies will be up?

wow...you've all got great cameras to work with. We only had a little over a grand to spend on a camera and we wanted to camperas to wokr multiple angles with. So, the best overall value we would find in a camera that fit our needs, the Samsung fit the best as well as price. They are not the best, but their picture quality in good lighting is awesome....they just need improvement in the low light area. I would love to have an used XL-1 in good condition or GL-2. As Napolean Dynamite would say: Luuckyyyy. Anyway...yah, we have the computer, we just need to invest in upgrade cameras now.

When will Batfollies be up? Good Question: Dan is working on that as we speak. Niether of us has built a web page so we're using Yahoo Web Page builder program to get it up and going. We will have a HighRes download of it on both Wizard Submission and 9 minute Directors Cut as well as streaming video. As always, I would recommend the download. We should have a rough cut web page up here in a day or so

Thanks - I just flopped up a really crappy website so that I could get the film shown. One of these days I will update my website to look somewhat respectable. Looking forward to the link.

Well...we paid for the Yahoo small business website hosting to give us increased bandwidth and 2 Gigs of storage on their server. It's like $11.95/mo. Not too bad.

Cool - I use dot5hosting which gives you 1.5GB storage plus 80GB in downloads per month (Yahoo is 25GB) - for $5 a month. I looked at Yahoo hosting, but I couldn't pass up this deal.

nice! 😱 Guess I should have done a bit more research. Did you submit your film to any other sources? We are submitting our to Ifilm as well.

Yeah, I submitted mine to iFilm, but haven't heard a response yet - they take forever!

That sucks. What is that you do diestler? Myself, I work for DirecTV as an entertainment consultant. Kind of a boring job but I get free t.v. and it pays well. 💃

I work in Administration at a University. Very laid back (great benefits), allows me time to make films.

nice. Yeah..I work 10hr shifts so I get 3 days off a week to organize shoots, write scripts, and storyboard. Fun stuff. Right now we are trying to brainstorm a new concept. We are going to work out to 30 minutes this time. Our trademark films are our Misadventures of Hal Williams series which is now up to part 5. You have to watch them in order as there is stuff in each one that will carry over to the next. Very kooky, but funny.

Man, I wish I could work 4 tens - or 3 for that matter🙂 Sounds like you stay pretty busy with filmmaking. I don't make as many films as I would like, but I try to make at least a couple a year. Is your Hal Williams series available online yet? Looking forward to seeing it.

we're going to have all of them available at the same time once we get the site up. I've been pushing Dan all week. He's probably getting sick of me. I don't care if the site looks like crap..I just want people to be able to view our work. We can fix the site up later.

I agree - can't wait.

You guys will be the first group notified that it's up and going. Figured, what the hell....we're all in this together. lol

OK guys! The site is up! Go to unifiedstudioproductions (.com as this site will not let me post a URL yet) and watch the flick we've posted. The Batfollies Directors Cut and Hal Williams series is all up and running! Jut right click on the icons and SAVE TARGET AS and watch them!