What I'm Working On: Miranda July, Reggie Watts, and the Teen Choice Awards.

Okay, so three new pieces of video here, edited by yours truly.  Two new, one old, but everything very cool (I think). First, "A Handy Guide For The Easily Distracted", the vignette I cut with Miranda as a promotional piece for her new film The Future.  Now that I've found an embedable link for the video, I decided to repost a note about it.  Check it out!  Then click the link below it to visit the original site with the posting and read a great interview with her about her work.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc57X0j_UwM&w=480&h=300] Click here to read her interview.

Next, a music video I cut featuring Reggie Watts. This video was finished a few months ago, but I haven't had the time to write about it.  The band featured in the song is Eagle And Talon, a super-awesome duo producing some great tunes.  Shot by Catherine Goldschmidt and edited by me!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f8MpPzi4bU&w=480&h=300]

Lastly, the 2011 Teen Choice Awards!  Yay!  Harry Potter was the big winner at this year's awards, so they asked me to cut a tribute package for the film to close the show.  It got a great response and even a mention in the Hollywood Reporter and other news sites.  Check it out here.  You can also watch the presentation from the TCA below it.

[vimeo 27507940 w=480&h=300]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqxyCihg_g&w=480&h=300]

What I'm Working On: Indiecade!

Okay, so it's been a while since I've done what I originally intended to do with this blog: keep my various projects aggregated into one site.  I'm slowly getting back into it, and I think I'll start back off by going in reverse order, starting with my project from the last few weeks. Recently, a friend of mine asked me to help her out cutting the video packages for the awards ceremony for the 3rd annual Indiecade Festival.  Indiecade is the International Festival of Independent Games.  In short, it is meant to be a sort of Sundance Film Festival for games produced outside the usual "studio" system.  The project comprised of thirty-two short :15 packages for each of the finalists in the festival and a finalist montage to open the event.   To balance out the work I had the help of fellow editor and USC Interactive Media student Cory Sanford, so I had more time to focus on the important opening montage.

All of our source footage came from each of the different production teams for each game, so you can imagine that all our media came in a nearly infinite amount of flavors.  I took advantage Perian's ability to open nearly any type of video file, and kept with a traditional offline/online workflow in my new version of Avid Media Composer 5. (Thanks Avid!)  Combining these two allowed me to turn nearly every source I was provided with into 10:1 Avid media straight from the source video file, since Avid's Import tool employs every Quicktime codec (i.e. Perian) installed on my editing system.  From there I was able to edit seamlessly without worrying about different codecs and without carrying around with me a boatload of media.  Once the edit was locked, I simply decomposed the Avid sequence and batch-imported the master clips at 1:1 from the original source files of those various flavors.  It worked like a charm.

[vimeo 15752510 w=540h=400]

The event was hosted by Levar Burton of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, two mainstays of my childhood.  It also featured live DJ sets by 8-Bit Weapon and awesome presenters including Isaiah Mustafah and Seth Gordon, director of The King Of Kong.  The show was at Sony Studios in Culver City.  It was a really fun event and a great festival to be a part of.  Slides below:

[slideshow]