What a Hiatus

Although unintentional, it seems like I have completely taken the summer off from any sort of blogventure. Whether its because I feel bad about not keeping up with the site how I intended to or just finally slowing down to the point where I realize how much I have left out, here I am, sitting in my living room with the computer on my lap and Practical Magic wrapping up on TV.

So...

Summer:
Thesis production was hectic and amazing, I can't wait to see how the class above us edits their projects and how those shot on RED will look.
All of the jobs that I worked on were a great experience, and I was surprised to find that I liked being the Art Director a lot. Working around a budget to create costumes and design the locations was challenging and very rewarding in the end.

Hey Chris! What are you doin now?

Oh, well I'm glad you asked. I'm on my two week break from school and back in Pittsburgh right now. I've recently realized that I need to read a lot more material on filmmaking. I've almost finished a pretty good one on producing a feature on a microbudget, and Im working up to several others on screenwriting and directing.

I've recently felt the urge to start writing something. You know that feeling of inspiration without any idea of what to do with it? That's what I'm working on and I'm just waiting to find a new idea. Then again, the feeling can be fleeting, but as of right now I feel like being productive and perhaps that the whole reason for me sitting down to this blog again.

Anyway, hopefully I will keep up with this for a while again, at the very least to not let Walter down, you know who you are, Walter that is.

I'll Catch You Up

So being that I created this blog long after starting Film School there have already been many notable events that I've missed. I'll go over a little bit of a back story to bring us up to date.

For the FSU Film School, sophomore year is the first year of actual production and strictly film related courses, thus I am a "first year" student. Freshman year was all the necessary classes (general english, math, etc.) in order to graduate with a bachelor's degree.

Our class is a very transitional one for the film school in that we are the first class most effected by the digital change. They scrapped the older Canon xl1's used for F1's (Production 1 projects) to get HD Sony XDCAM's, which are beautiful. Although this was a pretty great change for us, the biggest one will be the new RED cameras (www.red.com) we work on. These digital cameras shoot at 4k resolution (twice the quality of HD) and look like 35mm film. In the past, our school shot F2's, F3's and Thesis on 16mm film, which isn't bad, but with the new RED cameras we can reach the quality of 35mm and start to move with the industry over to digital (Crossing the Line, Jumper, Che, Angels and Demons all shot on RED).

But for now I'm working my way up. My F1, "Typewriter" was shot in HD on the XDCAM. Below is a screenshot.



I recently finished filming my F2, "Speed Dating," which is mainly an exercise with 16mm film. I don't know if film will forever be abolished by the industry, there is something about working on something so delicate to make an image look right that gives you a true sense of pride. There is so much that goes into creating the right look on film that digital does not have to deal with, be that a good thing or not.

I will update later on the documentaries currently in the process.