Things have been a little slow around here lately, owing largely to (insert major life event here) (okay, it was a wedding) (two non-Zombies) (Brett & Jess) (last year) (don’t tell anyone I told you) (yay wedding!).

Speaking of recent events, if you browse back through this site, you’ll see we participated in Cinema 2880 three times. We tried to join it again last year, but were told it was retired due to “budget cuts.” (No, not our short film!) Oh, no!

One of the contestants from Cinema 2880 wasn’t having it, though. They created something similar to Cinema 2880 called Kazoo 48. We found out about it a week ago, and jumped into it at the last minute. Maybe it was more like sauntered into it. I’ll give you a little behind-the-scenes, but first, our short, “Doghouse:”

We got the camera gear out, but couldn’t find our batteries. They were just here in 2017! Well, that’s okay. We have a friend who has the same camera and borrowed a battery from him Saturday night.

On Sunday morning, we came up with a script that nobody wrote down. Fortunately we remembered it just fine. We popped the battery in the camera and got our set put together. We picked the perfect lens and lined up the shot, only to find that the image coming through the camera — how to say this — wiggled! A lot! This camera is supposed to have built-in stabilization!

We changed gears (pun intended) to our older camera that films in HD without stabilization instead of 4K and shot the scene with that. During editing, it was jumpy, but a little stabilization in post went a long way.

With footage and foley, ambient and Premiere Pro, we put together the short above and sent it on to the contest organizers. Seventeen minutes late. Poetic, really, since our specifics included someone who was always late.

But a lot of good came out of our entering this competition. First, we found our batteries as soon as we didn’t need them any more. Second, it was awesome to get creative together again! Even if it was a turned-in-late one-minute-long short film for a contest five states away.

Until next time!