Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present to you my directorial début: Velocity. But first, a little background (if you're impatient, just hover your cursor over it and click on "Play"; this is a 39 MB streaming Flash video).
In the cold, rainy October of 2001, while taking Intensive Multimedia Studies at UBC Continuing Studies, I had a vision. Having already written poetry for five years (then; in addition to a number of short-short stories and a short play), I had a vision of visual verse. I needed the traditional components: structure, form, mood, emotion, ideas, meaning and rhythm - but in a different medium.
To make a long story short, I had a Canon DV camcorder, a FireWire card and a blank DV tape at my disposal for a day, and all the world to take in. So what did I film? Walking, the rhythm and sights of it; observation of minute details (which can only be done at leisure, when transporation is an end in itself, not a means to another end). I filmed people, roads, leaves, trees, the bus - inside and out, the streets; I filmed motion, I filmed silence, I filmed a journey and I filmed emotion. And I got about half an hour of footage.
I got back home, turned on Adobe Premiere 6.0 and recorded the footage onto the hard drive (it ended up being about 6 GB). I have then carefully marked in and out all the separate shots I made, labelling wide-angle shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups for easy manipulation later (there were over a hundred clips)...and I forgot about Velocity.
For the next three years, Velocity was only a shortcut to a folder on my desktop, an embarrasing testament to my lack of...whatever it was that made me abandon the project.
Meanwhile, software came and went, Premiere 6.0 turned into 6.01, 6.02, 6.5, CS 7.0. I myself came and went, taking they journey I filmed (and the inner journey I wanted to express in motion) many times before (many time since, still), thinking about the right way of cutting the movie some day. And then yesterday, against all odds, I sat down, found the right music, found the right mood, the right emotion, the right feeling the right rhythm and motion and sat for about six hours straight and made my short movie.
Premiere CS 7.0 failed on me miserably, as all my carefully marked-in Premiere 6.5 clips were all zeroed, for some reason. So, with all its errors and shortcomings, I went back to Premiere 6.5 and did my thing. Yesterday I came back and tweaked the timings, exported it to a new DV-AVI file and made a DVD. It is done.
Equipment and software used:
• Canon ZR30 MC (?) DV Camcorder
• FireWire card
• Adobe Premiere 6.0
• Adobe Premiere 6.5
• Adobe Photoshop CS 7.0
• Ulead DVD Movie Factory Disc Creator 3.0
Well, here it is, good to the last drop. ;) Better get it while it lasts here (272 MB). I cannot host a file this large on this server, so I took the risk to host it on my own machine (which is running Shareaza 24/7, anyway; with my High-Speed Xtreme-I connection all I need to worry about is putting a nice firewall on this machine [and ZoneAlarm is out of the question now; it keeps disappointing me more and more with each release]). [OK, now I can host a file this large on the server, since I upgraded to 1 GB of storage. The download speed should be faster than from an upload-capped cable modem, anyway. At any rate, get it here (272 MB).] [Alright, even that wasn't a viable solution; god bless Flash video.]
As well, keep in mind that I encoded it encoded Velocity with DivX Pro 5.02 at medium quality; if you don't have the DivX codec, get it here. If you're a (local) friend and you like Velocity, I can make you a DVD.
If you are not a frequent visitor to the site, it could be of interest to take a peek at some frame captures of Velocity (not all of them made the final cut), that I have posted back in May, here and here, having despaired of ever making the movie, at the time.
Torrent it and save yourself some bandwidth?
I shall watch it when I get home.
What a great idea! I'll do it.