pockets
02-05-2004, 06:46 PM
File this under "you could do this too". A project that's been a daily part of my life for the last three years looks to finally reach some closure. The HD indie feature I co-created and visual effects supervised with my brother, "Xtracurricular", is now an official exhibiter at the upcoming AFMA. Nobody told us we were crazy or not to try but we often wondered if we'd bitten off more than we could actually chew. Thankfully we stuck through it and now it might just be coming to a Blockbuster or cable channel near you.
http://www.xtracurricularfilm.com
In the Summer of 2001 I left a comfy existence born of over a decade in the digital effects and animation industry to return to my home state of Texas and make a movie with my brother. We approached potential investors with three ideas and ended up making a subversion of the teen comedy genre. We call our film a teen-action-dramedy-scifi. That's a mouthful but what else would you call a film that might be just a low-rent "Can't Hardly Wait" if not for the giant robot, nanites and kung fu?
Somehow in the midst of preparing for the shoot we swung a great deal on a Sony HDW-F900 rental (CineAlta) and what would have been a low-budget DVCAM project became a micro-budget HDCAM project.
The fine folks in Texas, not nearly as jaded towards film production as LA, made it possible for us to squeeze ten times the production value than would have been possible in Cali. On top of that I had to create some 100 or so digital effects that would add yet another layer of production value. We couldn't afford big stars but we were going to do our best to create something that would stand out from projects having similar bugetary constraints and we weren't going to let money completely dictate the scope of what kind of story was and was not possible or should and should not be attempted.
We ended up building a dual-G4 Mac editing station around the Pinnacle Cinewave and FinalCutPro combination. At the time it was the only online HiDef editing solution that didn't cost twice our shooting budget. And as happy as we were with our raw footage we're extra proud of the final color correction on the film achieved via Color Finesse and the Magic Bullet Look Suite.
So, it's not nearly as big or as important a story as recent studio drama or the oodles of tasty blockbusters in the works or entering the pipe but we hope one of these days our project will be used as an example of what can be done with the amazing tools available to filmmakers and artists and anyone who thinks they might want to try to make a movie. To borrow a slogan from Nike, "just do it."
http://www.xtracurricularfilm.com
In the Summer of 2001 I left a comfy existence born of over a decade in the digital effects and animation industry to return to my home state of Texas and make a movie with my brother. We approached potential investors with three ideas and ended up making a subversion of the teen comedy genre. We call our film a teen-action-dramedy-scifi. That's a mouthful but what else would you call a film that might be just a low-rent "Can't Hardly Wait" if not for the giant robot, nanites and kung fu?
Somehow in the midst of preparing for the shoot we swung a great deal on a Sony HDW-F900 rental (CineAlta) and what would have been a low-budget DVCAM project became a micro-budget HDCAM project.
The fine folks in Texas, not nearly as jaded towards film production as LA, made it possible for us to squeeze ten times the production value than would have been possible in Cali. On top of that I had to create some 100 or so digital effects that would add yet another layer of production value. We couldn't afford big stars but we were going to do our best to create something that would stand out from projects having similar bugetary constraints and we weren't going to let money completely dictate the scope of what kind of story was and was not possible or should and should not be attempted.
We ended up building a dual-G4 Mac editing station around the Pinnacle Cinewave and FinalCutPro combination. At the time it was the only online HiDef editing solution that didn't cost twice our shooting budget. And as happy as we were with our raw footage we're extra proud of the final color correction on the film achieved via Color Finesse and the Magic Bullet Look Suite.
So, it's not nearly as big or as important a story as recent studio drama or the oodles of tasty blockbusters in the works or entering the pipe but we hope one of these days our project will be used as an example of what can be done with the amazing tools available to filmmakers and artists and anyone who thinks they might want to try to make a movie. To borrow a slogan from Nike, "just do it."