I spent four years studying film and nonlinear post production in college. My college only taught one product for editing in the film department: Avid. We had state of the art facilities with a range of Avid products that would suit everything from the beginner filmmaker to the most advanced color correction labs available on the market. All of the hands on experience with Avid products made me comfortable with dealing with editing films and that resulted in me specializing my studies on post production my senior year.
My personal relationship with Avid Technology began in Spring 2007 when I had a chance to be an Avid student representative at NAB 2007. I was selected as a student representative for Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) along with three other SCAD students. About twenty students from 5 other schools were invited to be a part of the Avid NAB experience, and during this time we were asked to video blog about the show.
I was later selected to be an intern at Avid during the Summer of 2007, where I was part of their Marketing department and worked on several projects. Two of the project were websites based on open source technologies that were designed to help market Avid to a larger audience. One site targeted users who were familiar with Apple’s post production software and were making the switch to Avid. The website template was designed to mimic the look and feel of a Macintosh operating system and feature videos designed to familiarize the user with Avid software. Another website was designed to appeal to groups of Avid users who organize monthly events and meetings. The difficult part about this project was creating a site that was easy to use on the front end and back end, where administrators could learn to enter their data effortlessly to update the site.
Put Him in the Ground is a film written and directed by Daniel Vang, a fellow student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The film is about a young African American male rap artist who is about to make it big, but struggles with conforming to the more popular violent lyrics in order to succeed. The film finished primary post production in November 2007 and is currently retouching the music score. It should appear in a few film festivals in 2008.
I worked on this film through all three stages of production as an editor. During preproduction I was used for camera tests with the Panasonic HVX-200 and Redrock Micro lens adapter. The HVX shoots on P2 cards, which was something new I picked up on. I actually own my own HVX camera, but I have in the past always tethered it to a laptop with a firewire cord to record straight into Final Cut Pro. This option works fine if you have a speedy hard drive with plenty of free space, but if you don’t have that you will end up getting the occasional drop frame. Another downside to the tether mode is when you have a dolly shot where you need to keep the laptop close and hold it steady so the hard drive doesn’t lock up. The P2 cards offered typically 20 minutes of storage on a 16GB card recording 720p at 24 frames. While I’m speaking about these two recording modes I would like to mention a third method that I tried out at NAB 2007, the Firestore by Focus Enhancements. I had such a horrible experience using this product with a Canon camera at NAB, even with representatives from both Avid and Focus Enhancements there to help me out.
During my first quarter of my senior year at college I worked as the assistant editor for the film “Molly and the Good Shepherd”. The short film is based on the children’s book of the same title written by Chris Auer. Savannah College of Art design students and professors partnered to produce this film during Summer 2006. As the assistant editor I worked on an Avid system to perform various roles to help the editor and created a video trailer to be sent to investors.
Purgatory, Inc. was a short film written, directed and edited by myself two years ago. I wanted to wear as many hats as possible for this project so I ended up working all the way from pre production to post production. The story is about a man who shows up for a job interview, but ends up visiting the wrong office which ends up being purgatory. The film uses a lot of filming techniques that I had never tried in one of my own films before, including two dolly shots and a green screen segment. This was probably my favorite film to work on because I’m proud of being able to take on so many roles and try out new things.
