Check out our rushed submission to this year’s YouTube Project: Direct challenge, sponsored by the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Click here.
“Fresno Swede Fest The Second” took place today! We had such an awesome and enthused crowd for the first one that we decided to organize another ASAP. This time it was held it in a little (former) cafe in Fresno’s Chinatown (Yes, Chinatown, revitalization is happening!). Slightly bigger crowd this time, same number of entries, but all and all it was a good show! More info check out: www.dumbdrum.com/swedefest/ DumbDrum.com sponsors the event and that’s where I blog and co-host a podcast about local filmmaking.
Anywho, I sweded the trailer for “Army of Darkness.” weeee! Check it out below.
A couple weeks ago I came across all the raw footage for our short film “Moses”, which we created in an independent study class in 2006. A flood of memories about the production returned, as did the realization that I was never fully happy with the film.
The first edit in 2006 was rushed for our Fresno State screening (this was a class project with a deadline after all). The second edit came a couple days later, which was really just some small tweaks, stuff we didn’t get done for the screening.
But this third and final edit was something I’ve been wanting to do for a quite a while now. I always thought we did an excellent job shooting this thing, and I consider this some of my best camera and lighting work for a short film. But since it was a class project, we were obligated to stick to a script we didn’t write and stick with some performances that weren’t great (the actors needed to be in the film to get their grade).
Now that 2 years have passed, I didn’t feel so bad jumping back in and really tearing this thing apart. This is not a complete re-edit from scratch, but it’s an improvement. It’s much shorter now, it went from the original 26 minutes with no credits to 14.5 minutes with no credits. Several scenes were cut, new footage was added, new musical cues were added, color correction was tweaked, as was audio. Overall I think the film is paced much better now. The underlying plot had problems to begin with, and you can’t really get rid of those, but I think the film is much improved. And I’m finally satisfied, or as much as I can be!
Click here to view the re-edit.
The 2nd annual conference for Fresno Filmmakers is coming up this weekend, Saturday October 25th. Be there or be…. not a very good member of your local film community.  http://www.fresnofilmmakersforum.com
The DUmb podcast #11 is up, featuring everybody’s favorite local Film Commissioner Ray Arthur. If you don’t know yet, The DUmb, is a podcast focusing on local filmmaking. If you aren’t listening to it, you’ve got problems. Subscribe now. And apparently now I’m a co-host, weee!