Toronto Film Challenge

Kegan

Kegan

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Hey everyone, just wondering how many of you out there (if any) are participating in the upcoming Toronto Film Challenge. It's this Saturday and for those of you who don't know it's a 24 hour competition. This is the second TFC that I will be competing in, but the first time using my DVX. I used a Panasonic PVGS120 with a hockey stick boom mic:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG) and found that it just didn't cut it. Lots of problems so this time I decided to upgrade. I found a great authorized dealer while I was in Miami this past week, called Videoscope. Here's hoping that with all the knowledge I've gained on the site that it'll prove useful this Saturday!

-Kegan
 
Thanks and good luck with your competition Aram. If you haven't entered one before it's a blast. Lots of hard work but as long as you're organized and have a good crew it's always fun.

-Kegan
 
Well guys, I suppose I should update you all on what happened after starting discussion of it in the first place.

Meeting at the GO train station my team was all there BEFORE our scheduled meeting time. This was shocking, so I was sure someone forgot different clothes or a piece of equipment. Again, I was suprised with everyone being fully prepared.

Becoming more confident, we find the place downtown where we need to sign in and are one of the first to register. There are some B shooters around and they got some footage of me and my team.

The challenge finally starts and away we go with our bags in hand, eager to find out what's inside our "Challenge Pack". All we find in the bag is a MiniDV tape and a little envelope titled "Challenge Pack". We thought it was some kind of joke, and upon opening it we found that we have to find ourselves an issue of NOW magazine and turn to page 118 to be inspired.

Finally finding a current issue of NOW magazine, we turned to page 118 and I immediatley looked for the word "inspiration". It was a good guess as the first heading was "INSPIRATION" and was about the film challenge.

Our genre was "Toronto Living", our theme "Exposed", our word "Flannel" and our prop was the NOW magazine.

I'm sure many of you could think of a lot of different ideas for this, but when we started we honestly couldn't. We spent almost 3 hours trying to decide (over food of course) which direction to take it in.

After much deliberation we started to film, and moved from the downtown area to Durham. We filmed by the lake originally and that was horrible. The actors were absoloutley frozen and the wind made all the footage unusable. I forgot my wind screen for my mic and we didn't have time to get it.

On to another location where we were able to film the same scene, with no interference. It was good, but daylight was still running out and we had a few more outdoor scenes to do. Our next shot needed to be in an alley and the only one we could find was between an adult movie store and sexual education building.

Needless to say, shooting that scene was interesting and the dirty looks we got from the sex ed. building were not appreciated (at least by me:furious3:) We were off to shoot the indoor scenes next but had to hold off on the actual filming because everyone was hungry. I ordered a few pizzas, wings, garlic bread and picked up some beer which all seemed to satisfy the team.

We were now ready to shoot our last few scenes. There were a lot of lighting issues, but I think it overall gave the film a unique look and it took us a while to make up a couple extra scenes to fill time and tie up loose ends. This was quickly done, but for all our efficiency it was already 12 and we still had over an hour of footage to import and edit down to 4.5 to 6.5 minutes.

It was off to my house to edit and the person I had originally designated to edit said he was tired and wouldn't be able to do it. That was fine by me as I wanted to do the editing myself. I had a vision of what I wanted it to be and the editor and I had conflicting ideas all day long.

I have to admit it was my first time editing 24pa footage and didn't have much time to try all the things I wanted, but I had read lots of posts on this board concerning it and thought that it was decent considering the time restrictions and it being my only time.

Suprisingly it came to a tight 5:42 minutes and looked great to me. Even the other team members seemed to notice the difference in the "look" of the movie. We filled out all the remaining paperwork and I drove it downtown to the drop off point and got it in 5 minutes before the deadline.

All in all it was a great experience, especially it being my first time filming AND editing in 24pa (I only recently upgraded to my DVX100b). I'm sure there were many things that I didn't do or missed but it was a good time to learn. One thing I noticed I used too much of was gain and didn't figure out until post production-I should have taken everyone's advice and stayed away from it but sometimes to get the shots I needed and lighting was near impossible due to time restrictions it was necessary. I guess we'll see how it looks on the big screen, wish me luck guys!

-Kegan
 
Good Luck!

That's the spirit - a bounceboard a few people and inspiration.

Let us know how it goes. :beer:
 
Sounds awesome! I will definitely be entering one of these. Sounds like an amazing experience. When is the next one near the NYC area? I looked up the NYCmidnight madness one that Aram mentioned but they don't have a date yet.

Can't wait to see how your film turned out. Keep us posted.
 
Thats great. We did the 24 hour one last year and it was definitly bootcamp. We learned a lot and we think this year will be much better. This time we are going to write the story ourselves and shoot it. Last time we had everyone give ideas and we ran out of time. We had a strict schedule and ran 3 hours over because of the story thing. Another thing is to not have everyone there at the start. That just made sure everyone was equally tired. This time we are going to write the story that night and start really early the next day and this time have someone for each job instead of trying to do everything myself. We should have had someone composing from the start and also a separate editor. Ours looked cool but the story was not imaginative at all.
 
Hmm, that does sound good and appears that you've gone through the hours of idea offering as well. What I want to know though is how you plan on writing the story beforehand. How do you know what the genre/theme/props are before the day of the challenge? If it's different and you do get the idea before that'd be a great idea. Leave the day to filming and editing. There's an upcoming 48 hour one in June that I'm thinking about entering. I like the idea of having only some members there from the start. Good thinking.

-Kegan
 
Finally found it, alllllll the way back on the eighth page.

I'll tell you how the screening went, though I'll let it be known right now that I did not win. That's quite alright though, as I learned a lot from this challenge.

I didn't think that the competition would be quite so fierce but the other teams produced some high quality work. I'm sure it was hard for the judges to decide on which to pick as the winner. There were some that obviously weren't in the runnings, but that always happens. Now I know what to include in my next movie and what helps to make mine the winner.

It's not about winning, it's just the thrill of seeing your movie on a big screen that's great. I'm hoping to put together a team for the 48 hour film challenge in June. A more professional team this time and hopefully I can get a couple DVXusers involved as well.

It was a good run.

-Kegan
 
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