I took a video editing class in college that included a project to make a two-minute trailer for the movie of your choice.
It wasn’t about recreating the real trailer, but rather doing whatever you wanted to make it your own. On the surface this sounds really easy, but distilling a two-hour film down to a trailer that highlights enough to get people interested without giving too much away is a bit tough.
Neither I nor most of my group had the least bit of preference for which film to tackle, so we ended up going with Jason’s pick of “Life As A House.” This added another layer of difficulty since I’m pretty sure none of the rest of us had ever heard of the movie, let alone seen it.
Fortunately the local video rental place had a copy — VHS I believe — and a few viewings later we came up with this:
At gunpoint I could recite this entire thing word-for-word. I may have seen it a few too many times.
I’m especially proud of the ending, where Kevin Kline’s character is smashing all the little models to the beat of the music as if they are drums. This is one of those happy accidents that pops up in creative ventures sometimes. As I recall, the footage just happened to almost line up when we first cut it, so it was just a matter of tweaking things a bit (like slowing down the last shot) to get it just right.
So how did we do? Here’s the actual trailer from 2001:
We didn’t watch the real one until after ours was done. We felt like they told a totally different story, one that seemed to put a happier spin on the movie than what was actually there. Maybe they thought more people would want to go see it that way.
Things didn’t go so well at the box office though. Maybe they should have hired us instead.
During my junior and senior years of college, I was the president (mainly by default) of our school’s film club.
That meant running a lot of meetings that didn’t accomplish anything and eventually heading up the task of putting on the first- and second-ever student film festivals.
The first year was tough, as is any event you’re trying to create out of nothing. The club wasn’t very big, and there were more film-watching enthusiasts than filmmakers in the crowd.
As the event approached, it was clear we weren’t going to have many entries at all. So, given that I had a camera and a vested interest in not totally embarrassing ourselves, I walked around our campus for an hour and came up with a project.
I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started, but sort of figured it out as I went along. It’s basically a trip around the Susquehanna University campus using common sights from different areas or perspectives as a way to move from one place to the other.
It’s probably easier to follow if you went to the school, but even those who have never been to Selinsgrove can somewhat keep up. Some of the transitions work better than others — banners using the school logo and signs on buildings look pretty good, lightpoles not so much.
I’m continuing the quest of sharing videos on days I typically haven’t been posting new content.
If you missed the one from last week, check it out here. Also remember you can click the labels at the bottom of posts for similar content — in this case “video.”
This project is one that makes me laugh every time I watch it, even though I’m sure I’ve seen it roughly 2,381 times. I made it for this really amazing class I took in college called Film & Politics. Basically we used films with political themes (All The President’s Men, The China Syndrome, The Manchurian Candidate, Black Hawk Down, etc.) instead of a textbook to drive discussion and papers.
The final exam was one I knew I was going to get an A on as soon as I saw it: Make a trailer for your own political film (or write some sort of detailed summary of your plot).
As a communications major who already spent a good deal of time at that school in front of video equipment, there was nothing I liked seeing more in other departments than the opportunity to make a video. The production value alone on my projects I’m sure earned me high grades, but I also enjoyed the opportunity to share those skills with my classmates (in this case in the political science department).
I have to give great credit to my actors, MB, who is playing an intrepid reporter out to uncover a big conspiracy, and the maniacal Jason, a vice president hellbent on taking over the Oval Office.
Jason, who lived in my suite and was also in the class, had an amazing project we had to abandon because of technical issues. His idea was to do a sequel for Happy Gilmore, where Happy rides the momentum of his golf fame into a run for Senate. It would have been epic.
Just in case you didn’t already assume as much, I am definitely not one of the people who is super-psyched for the Royal Wedding.
I’m sure Will and Kate are perfectly nice people, but I just can’t get that excited about their wedding and all of the massive hoopla surrounding the event.
And yet, I somehow can’t help but stay really informed about it. Sure, I’m a journalist and tend to know a lot about what is going on in the world. But beyond writing a story about the announcement of the wedding date, I haven’t had any actual need to know this information.
In several recent conversations someone has mentioned a piece of Will and Kate news — like that the blouse she wore in the engagement photos was available in stores again — and I had to admit I was already aware. (Sad side note: To find that link, all I had to Google was “Kate blouse”).
I also know there’s a Lifetime movie about the couple, which happens to star a former Susquehanna University student as Kate.
She was apparently only there for a semester during my sophomore year, and I’m fairly certain I never met her. But given what she says about the school in an interview on Lopez Tonight, there’s at least a chance my roommate, Shawn L., did. (The brief Susquehanna portion starts around the 3:27 mark).
She basically says she wasn’t a big fan of the middle-of-nowhere, Amish country nature of the school and that there wasn’t much to do in the area. None of that is totally false — the campus is in a quiet, rural section that has lots of stores nearby and some great local business in town. It’s not exactly the New York club scene, but as the esteemed rock band Harvey Danger once said, “If you’re bored than you’re boring.”
Unlike Camilla, some people who come from big city areas actually like those aspects as a complete departure from what they’ve known the rest of their life. I found it refreshing to be able to drive somewhere without sitting in traffic, or to walk down the street in town and have a stranger walking by say hello to you.
And if that’s not for her, that’s OK. I’m not sure as a freshman I would have liked the University of Maryland, but as a graduate student I loved it.
What I found kind of funny about the interview — and where Shawn L. comes in — is when she mentions hanging out at the gas station as one of the prime attractions.
Me outside the Sunoco gas station in Selinsgrove, Pa., sometime during the 2001-02 school year (Photo by MinChin)
Shawn absolutely despised campus food and spent a good chunk of time at that gas station buying donuts and all kinds of random treats to eat instead. In fact, those habits earned him the nickname “Tastykakes.”
I can definitely see Camilla eating her nachos at the gas station as Shawn and his slightly humorous mustache stumbled in at 2 a.m. in search of some Swiss Rolls. Now that would have been a great conversation.
I just noticed a woeful number of postings for this month, and I really don’t have an excuse for not writing.
So to break the streak, I bring you what could be a useful collection of stories for those just finding the blog, those who started reading partway through the year or those who just want to relive some good times.
On this 20th day of the 10th month, I bring you the 10 best posts of 2010 (skipping posts from October — those are new enough for you to find on your own):
Oh Baby Baby Mom lets me know I face a deadline for producing a child. Also proof that including celebrities in your writing brings in readers (thanks, Natalie!)
Dealies, Please A trip down good-eating lane with perhaps my favorite food product on Earth. The accompanying picture belongs in a museum. Lessons From a Little Girl Easily the most popular post of the year. I share a meal with a 7-year-old girl and learn more than I would have dreamed possible. This post is a bonus on the list that adds a small part to the story.
Six Years Ago Today The anniversary of a special relationship. Also has pictures of bees. And a bonus link inside to a video of me solving a Rubik’s Cube.
During my sophomore year of college, I took a documentary film class that ended with an extremely disappointing project.
We had a good subject matter, and put a lot of work into the film, but the end result was not good at all. Two years later I had some time in my fall schedule, and took on an independent study project to give the documentary genre another shot. The focus of the project was The Crusader, the student newspaper at Susquehanna University.
I wanted to explore a few things that as a former editor I knew we had sometimes talked about in small groups, but had never discussed as an organization. There were issues like whether staff members should be paid, if the one practicum credit was worth all the effort, what it was like to put in all the work only to see people throw away the paper without reading it and what it was like to go through all of that together.
One side perk was that the communications department had some extra money to spend during the summer, so I arrived back at campus to find a brand new, top of the line Mac G5 editing system. It was one of those pieces of technology that is so beautiful you don’t even want to touch it. Not only was it a big step up from our Windows-based Adobe Premiere system, but nobody really knew how to use the FinalCut editing software. So as part of my independent study, I basically had the machine all to myself for the semester with the understanding that I would later teach people how to use it.
It was a pretty sweet deal.
I interviewed most of the editorial board within a week span about midway through the semester. The only major editor not featured is the sports editor Sarah, who not only had time constraints from playing volleyball but also was not a fan of talking to me with a camera in my hand.
The process for producing one issue of the weekly newspaper encompasses about a week and a half. All of the non-interview footage follows one specific issue — including the initial editorial board meeting, staff meeting, budget meeting and two nights of actually laying out the paper.
Here is the film in two parts, with additional discussion about the process below (after hitting play, change the 360p in the bottom right corner to 480p for optimal viewing):
After showing the film to everyone when it was done, I sent all of the editors a questionnaire to see what they thought. I asked for their overall impression, what insights they may have gained, whether they thought the subject was treated fairly and how they thought my relationship with the newspaper affected the film I was able to make.
The last question was really the most interesting to me. I started as a staff writer for the paper during my sophomore year, and the following year served as the sports editor. Senior year I dropped back to just being a writer, covering a few sports teams and writing the weekly sports column. For the edition seen in the film, I only wrote the sports column.
The editors said that because I had been in their position, they felt they were much more comfortable in opening up to me. They said they would have been much more wary about letting a total outsider into their office, and would have acted differently.
What none of us really expected was the wide range of opinions that came out during the interviews. The pay issue was particularly interesting with who wanted to pay whom, and why.
I also didn’t expect it to be as funny as it was (at least to me). The editors usually work very late nights on Wednesday and Thursdays, and there’s a certain amount of silliness that comes out of the process. I always chalked that up to people getting a little punchy without sleep, but the daytime interviews certainly brought out some sneaky funny people.
In total, I think I shot about 16 hours of footage using two different cameras (Sony PD170 and Panasonic PV-DV851). One of the biggest challenges was taking that monster stack of video and getting it in a somewhat organized state. That began with giving each tape a number (label your tapes!):
I then captured each tape into the computer, jotting down notes about specific shots I might want to use as the tape was playing. By the end of the project, I had kind of a mad scientist thing going on with my stack of notes. I’ll close with a few scanned sheets, with some attempted explanations as to what is going on with each one (links will open in new window):
Interview Questions I started out with a standard list of questions to ask each editor, and added a few more that were targeted to each one. As you can see, there are some issues that didn’t make it into the film. I had some additional directions I wanted to go, but at some point you just have to stop.
Video Bins This was probably the most important piece of paper to me for that entire semester. In FinalCut, you can create these virtual bins to organize sets of clips. What you see here are four sections (one for each portion of the paper), with a number and letter for each clip. I have two double-sided pages like this, and as crazy as it may look, it all made perfect sense to me at the time.
Film Outline Besides keeping all of the footage straight, developing the story of the film was the most difficult part. I spent a number of days hopelessly looking through the video trying to come up with a logical structure. You can see here the basic outline at the top and a more developed list below that with timecodes for where each section ends. Off to the right, there’s a pair of drawings with the words “narrative arc.” I think that came from trying to explain to my professor how each portion told its own story, and that those added up to a total arc that took us from one place to another.
Narration Script With an outline in place, the real anchor for moving the story along was the narration. I tried to say as little as possible, instead letting the editors tell their story. But there were a few parts that just needed a sentence or two of explanation to orient things. Probably the biggest thing I have wanted to redo is the voice track. At the time I recorded it, it was “good enough” to get the editing process rolling and I never went back to do a better version. Oh well.
I also can’t explain why I didn’t hide the mic cords during the interviews, which is definitely distracting. Finally, I wish I had taken the time to make a blooper reel. Sarah wouldn’t sit down for an interview, but I have a tape with an amazingly entertaining segment of her eating a piece of chocolate. The audio from some of the office interactions you saw but didn’t hear would have also been worth the effort.
Everyone has a favorite dish, the one you could eat any time of any day and instantly feel better about your life.
For me, there are few bits of culinary amazingness that can match the “dealies” at IT Express in Selinsgrove, Pa. They are actually called pepperoni roll-ups, but that takes far too long to say when you are telling your roommate what food you want delivered.
I was reunited with the dealies last weekend during a day trip to my alma mater, Susquehanna University. I met up with two close friends who were a part of a seemingly daily ritual that involved ordering something from IT. My love of the dealies got to the point that when my roommate, Shawn L., would order food, he would automatically get some for me.
When we walked into the restaurant on Saturday with our friend Mindy, the owner and his son greeted us as if it were 2003. I guess it’s good that they remember us since we got to a point that they knew Mindy’s voice when she would order over the phone and wouldn’t bother to even ask our address.
I told them I had dreams about the dealies, and that no matter how close some places here come to attempting a similar dish, it’s just not the same. I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat this:
So delicious. IT Express also has two other items near the top of my food list — Sicilian pizza and Wild Cherry Pepsi. I may need to move back to Selinsgrove just for the food.
The only problem with IT is that they are closed on Mondays. I cannot even begin to count the number of times we would walk into town, the taste of dealies tantalizingly close to our tongues, only to realize it was Monday and we were idiots. I would estimate somewhere in the 40 range during our four years, and that might be low.
Of course beyond the food it was nice to be hanging out with old friends. Mindy didn’t graduate with us, but she was with us for our first two years. She also spent our sophomore year living with my first roommate, Shawn R., and thus can appreciate the unique experience therein. I shared a little about him in a post last year.
The funny thing was as much as we were together during our two or four years, we found on Saturday that there were tons of stories that one person in the group had never heard. It’s possible we just forgot, but I guess that just goes to show how much we assume other people know.
Standing in front of Mindy’s old apartment (which after 7 years still had the same shower curtain, gross) we had one of those total flashback moments to so many days at SU:
“So, what do you want to do now?” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” “I don’t know, we’ll figure something out.”
The short-term answer was to walk to the river, which is just down the street from where Mindy used to live. By just down the street, I mean you can walk there in 30 seconds. In the year she lived there, she never once made the trip and it didn’t seem as if she even knew it was there. Which is a shame given her crazy roommate situation and the absolute serenity of sitting on a bench looking out onto that water.
While the three of us were sitting on the bench, Shawn L. (who is deathly afraid of spiders, not important here but I wanted to share) said he got the strongest feeling of deja vu he had ever felt. I will say it was strangely good to be around them and to see how seamlessly we slipped back into 2003.
We’ll be back next year, though maybe then Mindy can figure out how to take the date stamp off of her camera:
One other entertaining note. Shawn lives about 45 minutes north of me, conveniently right on the route that I would take to get to school. I picked him up at a mall where we met to enjoy some Starbucks action. It turned out the Starbucks there closed (along with half of the other stores), but the trip was redeemed by a sign in the bathroom:
So watch yourself or I might trespass you right out of here.
I have learned a lot in the last week about living life at half speed.
Actually it’s been slightly more than a week. I would have written this yesterday, but one of the things I learned is that going to the grocery store takes forever when you’re limping around. I also found that a shopping cart is kind of like a walker on steroids.
If you have ever gone someplace with me that involved walking you probably know that I typically stroll quite quickly. So it is less than ideal to have a stress fracture in my foot that means I have to wear a stylish flat-soled shoe.
In addition to the natural avoidance of pain, I’m also being slowed down by the shoe’s construction. Though today I worked on a sort of combo limp-run, which entails running on the left (uninjured) foot and limping on the right. The result is a slightly faster walking speed without putting the bum foot in jeopardy.
So we’re making progress.
Last weekend I found myself in a rare scenario these days. I was wearing a Susquehanna University sweatshirt and was in a place where I bet at least 75 percent of the people around me knew what that was. Of course being at a Taco Bell in central PA is almost cheating in that regard. But it was still a happy time.
Few items in my life have brought joy to those close to me like Mini Football. I capitalize this palm-sized ball because it is just that special.
Ordinarily, this is where I’d show you a picture of the magnificent Mini Football. But you’ll have to either wait for the end or scroll to the bottom for a moment. You have my roommate Mike to blame for this. I asked him about the “Hat Came Back” post the other day and he said he stopped reading at the picture.
He’s also the latest to be indoctrinated into the wonders of Mini Football. It’s small enough that you can get in some quality tosses indoors without A) breaking anything and B) not wear out your arm when going for hours on end.
It looks like a regular ball–leather cover, stitches, full or air–but I defy you to find another ball in existence that has brought so much entertainment in a short life span.
The core group of Mini Football enthusiasts attended Susquehanna University sometime between 2001 and 2005. My roommate Shawn–that’s Shawn L. for you longtime readers–is certainly in the MF Hall of Fame.
During our junior year, we had desks that faced each other on opposite sides of the room. Hour after hour passed with the ball sailing precariously over our monitors to the delight of everyone involved.
But it was really freshman year that MF secure its place in the hearts of the masses. Pick a random night and you’d find myself, Shawn L. and our friend Mindy passing the time in my room. I’d grab the ball from the shelf next to my desk and toss it to one of them. For the next (insert a scary number here) hours, that’s all we’d do. I mean, we’d chat and whatnot and maybe there would be a movie on. But the real action was the MF flying from point to point around the room.
The real fun came when someone made a bad throw, and the ball was no longer within anyone’s reach. We would do absolutely everything in our power to retrieve the ball without having to get up. Sometimes that meant tying together two lanyards with our keys to make a sort of lasso to snare it and pull it back. Other times we would get more adventurous and throw a shoe. If we tried five or six methods and still didn’t have the ball back–or even pushed it farther away–then someone would take one for the team and get up to get the ball.
Sophomore year was a little tougher, mainly since Shawn L. and I lived in a tiny room with desks that practically touched one another.
So maybe the MF was eager for us to move into a spacious suite and introduce some new people to the game. We even came up with a new contest, a version of H-O-R-S-E where you had to toss MF onto a foldout chair in order to score a “basket.” This was probably the most difficult game I have ever played. But it did lead to one instance in which I rode a bike down the hallway of our building, made a sharp left turn into our common area and tossed the ball safely onto the chair. I’m pretty sure Shawn L. didn’t even attempt that one.
Visitors were always fond of being involved in MF action. Several also threatened to steal the beloved ball for their own use, only to be threatened with certain death.
I can only think of one negative experience involving MF, which led to it being used solely in indoor situations.
I’ll take you back to freshman year at SU, just outside Smith Hall where Mindy, Shawn L. and I all lived on the rocking third floor. For some reason we decided that taking the football outside, at night, was a good idea. And I guess it was for maybe 15 minutes.
We were stationed in a small piece of grass near a streetlamp so we could see what we were doing. If I had to guess, I’d say it was easily 11 p.m. We saw a mysterious figure approaching us at a pretty slow pace. He was coming across the field hockey practice field, which was directly behind the dorm.
When he got to us, the guy clearly on some sort of–and probably multiple–substances. He immediately launched into a slur-filled rant about the lacrosse coach being mad at us. He said we should go to his office right now and apologize for everything we’ve done.
At this point, Mindy retreated to the nearby door and held it open. The mystery man–who was roughly 6-2, 230–became more and more insistent that we straighten things out with the lacrosse coach. I’ll take a second and point out that none of the three of us would have any reason to have even met the lacrosse coach and thus could have no beef.
Things really got interesting when he put his arm around Shawn L., who I believe is roughly 5-6. That’s when we stopped sort of blindly agreeing with him and waiting for him to be on his merry way. We told him something like we knew we had screwed up and we were on our way to apologize with the coach. Finally we hit on the right combination of those nonsensical promises and he turned around and slowly walked away.
We went inside with MF and decided it was probably best to keep that as an indoor game. MF has rewarded us with hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of good times. He must not be an outdoorsy kind of ball.
Thanks to my friends at Netflix, my Wednesday night was spent with a wonderful movie spoken exclusively in French.
Fortunately, “The Class” had English subtitles so I could actually follow what was going on. It also had a lead actor who looked far too much like my roommate from freshman year of college.
For those of you who didn’t live in at Susquehanna University’s Smith Hall room 315, here’s what my roommate Shawn looked like.
Of course, that Shawn is not to be confused with the other kid named Shawn I lived with for the other three years at SU. For clarity sake, I’ll refer to them as Shawn R. (freshman year) and Shawn L. (sophomore, junior & senior years).
Life with Shawn R. was definitely an experience. When we first talked on the phone a few weeks before we moved in, I quickly figured out we weren’t really running in the same circles. He asked what stuff I was planning on bringing and I mentioned my Sega Dreamcast.
“What’s that?” he asked. “It’s a video game system.” “Oh.”
The biggest thing you need to know about Shawn R., he was very neat. I mean, I may be considered a neat freak by regular standards, but living with Shawn R. made me feel like a slob.
He was also from Maine, which meant that on short breaks–the 3 and 4-day weekends–he didn’t go home. I got back to our dorm after one of those breaks and noticed my bed was made. I didn’t think much of it, though I probably made my bed twice the whole year. Then I got an IM from my friend Mindy, who happened to live just down the hall with Shawn R.’s girlfriend.
“Notice anything about your room?” “Um, no….” “Look at your bed.” “My bed is made.” “He MADE your bed!”
Apparently, after a day or so of sitting in our room and looking at my unmade bed, Shawn R. just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to make it. That’s what I call neat. Though maybe I should have expected something like that from a freshman male who mopped our floor on several occasions.
That made the Sprite incident all the more interesting.
Mindy and I frequently ordered food with Shawn L. and ate down in her room. After one of our meals arrived, I went back to my room to grab a plastic bottle of Sprite from our fridge. It was the last one, so I opened my closet and grabbed two more bottles so there would be a cold one for later.
And then it happened. I used my left hand–already holding two bottles–to close the closet door. Like the genius that I am, I also left part of my hand in the quickly closing door. The door and my hand tried to occupy the same space, which resulted in quite a deal of pain. It also caused my hand to forget it was holding two plastic bottles, sending them crashing to the ground.
One of the bottles was unharmed. The other exploded. Actually, I’m not sure exploded is the right word. There may not be a word for what happened to the contents of that bottle. The second–and I mean iota of a second–the bottle hit the ground, a slit the size of a splinter opened up in the bottom. In an instant, Sprite mist coated every corner of the room. I barely had time to blink. My eyelid started to come down, my eye looking over a perfectly clean room. By the time it closed and reopened, the clear, sticky mess was everywhere.
The ceiling was covered with little dots of soda. The mirror on the other side of the room looked like I had just sprayed it with some sort of cleaner. My shirt looked like I had just been hit in the chest with a water balloon. Shawn R.’s CD rack looked like I had dumped the bottle all over it. His computer screen…his desk…you get the picture.
I had to make the long walk back to Mindy’s room with a sense of utter dread. Not only was I not going to be enjoying my food, but now I also had to borrow all available cleaning supplies and spend the rest of my day scrubbing.
I’d be willing to bet there’s still a fine mist of Sprite on the ceiling in Smith 315.
