Community Project

NickClapper

NickClapper

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]
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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.
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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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Nice work Wheat!

I'm moving this weekend, but grabbing shots suitable for "cellphone" plates is still on my list. Do we care about time of day for those? I was thinking dawn. Can provide SF, rural CA and now featuring LA.
 
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So I cobbled this together, logo-wise. Thoughts? Love? Hate? Right or wrong direction? Suggestions?

edit: the IT attachment feature converted it to jpeg and compressed the living daylights out of it, but you get the idea.
 

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Dreadylocks said:
So I cobbled this together, logo-wise. Thoughts? Love? Hate? Right or wrong direction? Suggestions?

edit: the IT attachment feature converted it to jpeg and compressed the living daylights out of it, but you get the idea.
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Looks really good.

I actually like the kind of analogue vibe that the design has. For some reason, it reminds me of the Orson Welles' version of War of the Worlds, which I think would be a cool reference point for this project. Could we make the site design look like quite an old-fashioned 'Stay at home, stay safe' poster? Let me find an example...

playsafe.jpg


I don't know what you think of that as an idea. Might be quite fun but feel free to do your own thing!
 
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Dreadylocks said:
I like that idea. I know I could definitely design a poster in that style, no problem. Let me see if I can translate it into a website. :)
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I think it could work quite well for a quirky web design! Interested to see what you come up with...

JUST TO CONFIRM: CF and Wheat, you're doing the rest of your filming this week, right?

And David, you've got all your footage? And it's transferring to CF?
 
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I'm glad we have an official decision on the opening, and for what it's worth, I like it. :)

Walter, I finally just gave Sync a try. It's not doing anything; I'm assuming your CPU is off at the moment? I leave mine on 24/7, so I'm assuming it'll start downloading when yours is turned back on?

I couldn't comment until I heard back from my artist. She tells me she'll be finished by Saturday. I was originally going to use her as the lead, but she's no longer interested in that. Probably for the better; our local college has a really great theater department, so there are a ton of good actors in Richmond. With my artist telling me she'll be done with the painting soon, I finally feel like I can put out a casting call, and yes, I'd like to shoot this weekend.

David and Wheat, how would you like to transfer your footage? I'm open to whatever. Might this be the time to give the creative cloud a whirl? I'll be editing on Premiere. I own a copy of 5.0, but I've been curious to try the cloud. I could get a one-month membership, and that would allow others to make contributions (color-grading, anybody?). Membership comes with 20GB cloud storage. I'm not sure how that would work, though, cuz I'm pretty sure this project is going to require much more than 20GB of storage.

EDIT: Sync has begun receiving the files. It's only downloading at 100Kb/s. Weak. Says it's gonna take two days, haha! I'll keep an eye on it.
 
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cheeseandachallenge said:
Hey, I don't think I'll be able to provide any voices. Work, uni, and a couple of editing gigs are becoming super busy, so I don't think I'll get time in the next few weeks. Sorry gang.
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Don't sweat it, you've already done more than your fair share!

LegacyOfWax said:
I would love to help, is there anything I could do to participate in this?
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Hi LoW!

Well, we're in the final stages of production now and will be moving into post-production by mid-September (fingers crossed!). Do you have any specific skills that we could utilise, particularly in post-production or marketing?
 
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NickClapper said:
Well, we're in the final stages of production now and will be moving into post-production by mid-September (fingers crossed!). Do you have any specific skills that we could utilise, particularly in post-production or marketing?
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I'm way to late to the party then!
I am a musician, I write and compose scores for fun. If you need a sound track or anything. but at this point I would assume that you all would have someone.
Thats ok tho, I can't wait to see what comes of everyone working together.
I hope there will be a new one soon. I would love to try my hand at somthing.

WAX
 
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LegacyOfWax said:
I'm way to late to the party then!
I am a musician, I write and compose scores for fun. If you need a sound track or anything. but at this point I would assume that you all would have someone.
Thats ok tho, I can't wait to see what comes of everyone working together.
I hope there will be a new one soon. I would love to try my hand at somthing.
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I definitely think that, if we manage to make a short film here, then we'll try another Community Project in 2015. It's taken quite a bit of time and preparation, but it's shaping up really nicely.

JoshL is our lead composer – I'm not sure whether he'd be able to integrate any of your work, but it might be worth dropping him a PM if you're interested.

Otherwise, we'll see you on Community Project v2.0!
 
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LegacyOfWax said:
I'm way to late to the party then!
I am a musician, I write and compose scores for fun. If you need a sound track or anything. but at this point I would assume that you all would have someone.
Thats ok tho, I can't wait to see what comes of everyone working together.
I hope there will be a new one soon. I would love to try my hand at somthing.

WAX
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Well, we maybe could use a track (a real song) for the openingssequence, although changes are only a small piece of the intro will be used.
 
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I've got Walter's footage, and it's beautiful! For those asking about TorrentSync, I can't answer. I turned it on, then went on a road trip. I came home and it was finished; not sure how long it took.
 
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chiming in, because I haven't, and won't really be relevant until post, but LegacyOfWax, definitely drop me a line. We should collaborate, be it orchestrating each other's melodies, or doing sound design for tunes! I want to make this as collaborative as everything else has been!
 
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Cracker Funk said:
I've got Walter's footage, and it's beautiful! For those asking about TorrentSync, I can't answer. I turned it on, then went on a road trip. I came home and it was finished; not sure how long it took.
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Great – how much of the footage have you got now? I'm assuming you have C&C's and Walter's, but no-one else's..?

Haven't heard from David for a while, hope everything's ok with the sound from his scene.

JoshL said:
chiming in, because I haven't, and won't really be relevant until post, but LegacyOfWax, definitely drop me a line. We should collaborate, be it orchestrating each other's melodies, or doing sound design for tunes! I want to make this as collaborative as everything else has been!
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You're in charge of the Music team, so feel free to make it work however you please. I agree that the more collaboration the better, though we obviously want the standard to be as high as possible.
 
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