October was a busy month for No Zombies. We participated in the Cinema 2880 competition (and won an award!) as well as completing a 48 Hour Horror film project. Using our horror script specifics generator, we got the following specifics:
Character name: Mohammad / Micha Woolbright
Occupation: Loan Interviewers and Clerks
Prop: Slippers
Line of Dialogue: People can never agree on what is enough
Genre: Mad scientist / Frankenstein
Here’s the second cut of what we came up with:
As to the version done at the end of 48 hours, we thought it was good – we certainly would have been proud of it had we had to turn it in for a competition – but it needed to be cleaned up some more. Also, if this were an official 48HFP, we would have been disqualified for two things: we got the line of dialogue wrong (we said, “you people just don’t know when is enough”), and our film was too long at 8 minutes 23 seconds total run time (including credits). This second cut shows the results of an additional five or so hours of editing work. It cleans up some of the scenes, and shortens the overall run time to 7 minutes 49 seconds. That said, while watching it, I don’t think it feels long. There are definitely some films that hit a couple minutes in and you wonder if it’s ever going to end. This was not one of those films.
This was a fairly ambitious undertaking, and like all our projects was educational. We had one new member who we hope to see return for future projects. We used green screen in a short for the first time (even though we didn’t actually do anything with it beyond keying it out). We did some special effects here and there that turned out good.
I have been experiencing a lot of problems with Adobe Premiere Pro CC lately, particularly with the timeline getting hung up trying to trim videos, crashing, and trouble rendering video out. It also frequently tells me I can’t save the project due to some error (maybe the way it interacts with Dropbox?). These persisted even after a reinstall. Now that the competition is over I’ll have to look into what I can do to improve it.