48hour

For the past 3 years I’ve been participating in the 48 Hour Film Festival. The closest is in Kansas City, MO which is a little over an hour’s drive from my home in Topeka, KS. Which means, I drive to Kansas City on opening night for the kick off, drive home and nap for about 5 hours, then back to Kansas City where I help shoot and edit the film for the next 24 to 28 hours and finally a long drive home totally exhausted.

This year, rather than working on a team in Kansas City, I decided to create my own team in Topeka. I put together a crew and a great group of young actors. My schedule will be just as grueling because I have to drive to Kansas City for the kick-off party, drive to Topeka to meet with the writing crew and work on the script until 2am-ish in the morning, then nap for 4 hours before getting up to begin rehearsals and shooting. Then nap for 3 to 4 hours before joining the editing crew for 24+ hours and driving back to Kansas City to turn in the film.

It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s great training for dealing with deadlines and shooting stuff “on the fly” which definitely comes in handy when shooting stuff for stock video.

I’ll post a link to the video after we win. 🙂

These past two months I have been very busy with a number of projects. I worked as an Associate Producer and Director of Photography on an small Indie Film. I took a few consulting gigs as a photographer. I wrote a script for a documentary I plan to start shooting in October. And I signed on as an Associate Producer and Director of Photography on a local TV/Web show.

As a consequence of all that, I have purchased a lot of support equipment for my two cameras. A shotgun microphone, an external audio recorder, lav mics, lighting equipment, and more. So over the next month I’ll be posting blogs on the equipment I’ve purchased and how I’m using most of it to shoot stock photography as well as the video projects they were purchased for.

When I need something for a project the very first place I look to see what might be useful and actually work is a web site called CheesyCam. CheesyCam is dedicated to cheap film making. It occasionally has posts about DIY projects for building useful equipment (Track Dolly, Shoulder Mount, DSLR Cage, etc..). But they also find a lot of really good deals on cheap equipment (usually directly from Chinese distributors on eBay). Best of all, most of the reviews posted include accompanied video which demonstrates the equipment being reviewed. I highly recommend the site.

In the meantime, here is a short film I worked on for the 48 Hour Film Festival in Kansas City over the summer.

[vimeo]https://www.vimeo.com/14046343[/vimeo]

48 Hour Film Festival – Kansas City

More to come…