Well, here it is, my second video project: Now. (To play the movie, just hover your cursor over it and click on "Play"; this is a 22 MB streaming Flash video).
Well, where to begin? This wonderful little creation was a brainchild of recent contemplations on how to best capture an accurate, yet abstract, cross-section of "the life." As it always is with many successful projects, Now started as one thing and ended up being something completely different. I was aiming for slow, mystically-paced surrealism or magic realism, but, I suppose, I still haven't got Velocity out of my system yet, heh. Thus, I decided to try to change my style and pacing and to start looking for new ways of showing concepts, feelings and ideas to the viewer.
Ever since I got my Pentax Optio S50, I have been clandestinely taking short (and some longer) videos at various venues and events, so that, in addition to various webcam fodder collected over the years, as well as a couple of shots yoinked from Carol's photo album, I had more than enough material to work with. In the music department, I chose one of Yann Tiersen's beautiful, sad and energetic pieces from the Good Bye Lenin! soundtrack (and one more for the closing credits). Everything else involved trimming and tweaking the music to suit my pacing and then finding a concept to centre the short film around (in the end, it turned out to be two related concepts).
The number one problem was, as always, technology; having switched from Adobe Premiere 6.0/6.5 (with which I made Velocity), to Adobe Premiere 1.5 (1.0 was a buggy, memory-eating piece of shit), I had to re-learn a number of things, since (surprise, surprise), a number of time-tested 6.0/6.5 filters and other features were eliminated in favour of new "improvements." No doubt, Premiere 1.5 handled the task very well, for the most part, since I worked with over ten layers of film at certain points in the process (and I have to mention here that I have a mere 512 MB of DDR, despite having a very good machine), so that despite this sort of bottleneck, 80% of the process were flawless.
The other 20% were more trying; rendering previews was a nightmare, as always, and I still haven't figured out where the video and audio rubber bands (for fade-ins and fade-outs) have gone. As well, at least two or three times, I experienced some anomalous behaviour, such as unexpected response from functions, which just seems to randomly plague Adobe products (in Photoshop, for instance, only too often, [perhaps ever since CS1], brushes stop working and only a restart of the program can fix the issue). Completely unexpectedly, Premiere 1.5 refused to open Motion JPEG files (produced by still cameras), and, after a search on the Adobe forums, I found out that is solely because of a licensing issue, and that this can be circumvented by simply giving the files .MPG extensions. I wasn't so lucky with some of the other files, and quite a bit of effort went into actually importing the files into Premiere, resizing them to be the same size as the other clips, then carefully timing them to the music and to each other.
What began as an idea at about 4 AM last night morning, soon turned into a full-blown mini-project, involving thirty video clips (totalling 1.28 GB, smaller than my 6 GB of Velocity raw materials), two songs, and a bunch of title cards. In my usual habit, I have worked on this non-stop for about twenty-five hours now (excluding about four or five hours of sleep at one point), including preparation, editing, encoding and exporting the film into Flash video, and I feel great. Enjoy. ;)