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watch The Secret Jedi - a short film

A

Astunoth

Hi everyone, I hope you can check out my film THE SECRET JEDI and let me know how what you think. I shot it with, believe it or not, an old school mini-DV Sony TRV900 camera. So SD standard def, but we performed an HD upconvert on it in Final Cut. EFX using After Effects.

A bit about myself, I went to grad film school at UCLA and graduated last year. If you have any questions at all about my experiences there, you can also ask away.

Great to have found this forum and hope everyone makes great films!

Best,

Richard Hom

-----

THE SECRET JEDI

On another boring day in the big city, Jack finds a lightsaber and it becomes his best pal in the whole wide world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC4LUCKLU2E&hd=1
 
This could have been just another internet lightsaber video, but no you laid down some Flock of Seagulls and set yourself apart from the rest.
Great job.
 
wheatgrinder said:
Just you and a camera I presume?

Image could have been better in some shots.
Click to expand...

It was myself and my DP. No other crew otherwise. The way to shoot every movie! lol.

In terms of the image, do you mean the image quality? Or the way some shots are set up? We shot in standard def with my ten year old DV camera because all the better cameras at school were checked out. The HD upconvert helped a little but yeah, a Canon 5D would have made it look much better. Ah, c'est la vie!
 
pen said:
Can you use that song in a video? Not sure about the rights..
Click to expand...

You can use that song on Youtube because their Content ID technology will recognize it and will automatically apply whatever policy the record company has on file for that song. In the case of "I Ran", the music publisher EMI allows you to use the song everywhere except in Germany. So right now, my film is blocked in Germany. You can't view it on Youtube over there. (A Star Wars fan from Germany actually told me that he can't watch the film over there!) But it's okay everywhere else. Youtube and most music companies allow this because they actually make money off of you using their songs in your films. If you've noticed, links to purchasing the song on Amazon and Itunes appear in the lower right of the video. Also, Youtube runs ads on top of the film and if a viewer clicks on those ads, then A Flock of Seagulls/EMI shares in the revenue generated by those ads. Since Youtube is ad supported. And we all know how Google makes their money - through advertising! So it's pretty much a win win. I get to use their awesome song in my film and they get to make all the money off of it. Waitasecond - how's that good for me?? lol.
 
That's really interesting about the Content ID tech...I wasn't aware of it (and only aware of artists such as Prince that publicly hunt down songs being used on youtube without permission). It's good to see it working on the other side to. Is there a list/database that details permissions? For example, if "I Ran" wasn't cleared, but "Space Age Love Song" was, it'd be nice to know before you finished editing/posting your video.

On a vaguely related note, I saw Flock of Seagulls in 96 with Modern English (I'm more of a Modern English fan..."Someone's Calling" is one of my favorite songs). They were pretty good live, though I learned that Mike Score is a creepy, creepy man. I was hanging around, seeing if I had the courage to talk to a girl there (I didn't) and he was sitting at the bar. Staring at me. Probably in a "I'm famous and you should want to talk to me" way, or possibly a "why is this kid just standing around...is he going to do something interesting?" way, but it seemed to me more a "I'm going to bury each of your bones in different apple orchards" way.

Fun show though, and awesome that you can use the song in your video!
 
wow some interesting stuff there. how can you check songs if they are usable or not? is there an online database?
 
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