Last summer I worked on a short film at the Digital Animation & Visual Effects School as the editor. I was hired as the full time editor on the school’s most ambitious visual effects project to date. The film is called NASA SEALS. I am not a student or a graduate of the school, I was hired as staff for the duration of this project. The school does a final movie project with each class, but this movie was a special project for graduates. This project was so ambitious that Jeff, the school owner, hired Emmy Award winning visual effects supervisor, Lee Stringer, to oversee the production.The film is about 12 minutes long, and at 160 plus effects shots, has more effects than most feature length films. Some shots are live action with composited effects, others are entirely CG. The live action footage was shot with a Panasonic DVX100a, primarily in a closed down power plant, and on the green screen stage at the school. There were a couple of other locations for some of the smaller scenes. We shot a couple of scenes, which I lit, on the stage, and in the main lobby of Cyberdyne Systems, at the Terminator 2 attraction at Universal Studios Orlando. The footage at T2 was shot with the Panasonic VariCam. This was my first experience editing VariCam footage. First impressions… the footage looked fantastic but there were some audio sync problems because there were mixed frame rates on the same tape. It didn’t matter too much because all of those shots were MOS.Over all, this was a great learning experience. I have had some experience with visual effects in the past, but nothing even remotely close to the scope of this project. I learned loads. Most importantly, how an effects house workflow operates. You can see the film at the DAVE School web site. Let me know what you think of the fabulous editing.
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
Anyone that has tried to visit this site in the past couple of weeks is probably aware of the problems that I have had. I appologize for the delay in returning the site to working order. In the process of upgrading my installation of WordPress, I made a backup of the database. After making the backup, I re-installed WrordPress, then attempted to restore that backup. Well, it didn’t work. I tried everything I could think of. I finally had to have the hosting compnay restore it. It took them a while, but it’s done now.
Another noticeable change is that the domain for this blog is now paulzadie.com. It can still be reached by way of zadie.com or zadie.com/blog. That’s all for the technical difficulties. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
After almost a year, I have finally received my first credits on the Internet Movie Database. As I previously posted, I have been waiting for this to happen since The Last Will secured international distribution with Quantum Entertainment. I am credited twice for The Last Will. I have one Producer credit as Associate Producer, and the other as Editor. I actually have more credits on the project than that, but I am glad that these two are the only ones listed. Too many credits on one project would be overkill. The bigger the credit, the more significance it carries. Too many credits seem to dilute the importance of the big ones. This is just my opinion. Besides, producing and editing are the two areas of filmmaking that I am actively pursuing as a career. Producing keeps the left side of my brain working, while editing keeps the right side challenged. I need that right-brained activity to keep my creative hunger satiated after so much time as a digital media artist.
I haven’t been posting updates that frequently over the past couple of months. Progress on some of my projects has been slow, but it’s time to go full steam on Bobby Bo Bodeo and The Dockmaster, so updates should be flowing in to the site more regularly in the coming weeks.
