48-Hour Video Race Experience

Our fifth assignment of the semester was the 48-hour video race. It began at 4pm Monday, March 30th and ended Wednesday night, April 1st, at the Cheese Sandwich Film Festival. We had a mystery prop which was "My God, It's Full of Stars," the line from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. We also had to have a cheese sandwich somewhere in our one minute film. With all of that, we also could not use any type of recording video camera or film. It had to be photo stills, animation, drawing, scratching, etc... anything that didn't record pretty much.

Coming into this project I was really excited because this project is what I saw last semester and it made me want to take this class. I also already had ideas of what I was going to do or at least how I was going to film it... which was with digital camera stills. And I was going to put them all in a "cartoon" effect to make it look unique. Well, before the project even began my computer crashed. Saturday night. I took it in Monday, when the race began, and didn't get it back until Wednesday afternoon. Once we got the prop I decided I would focus on three different parts that would relatively be around 20 seconds each of the one minute film. The parts where: glow-in-the-dark stars, people and signs with the stars to show how everyday people are "stars," and then drawings I did (similar to the 2-D Animation) that had the actual line ("my god its full of stars) in it. I latter was the easiest. The second part was hard because I had to randomly ask a bunch of people to put on this star and let me take a picture of them... it was fun though. And also when I put random stars on things like peoples cars and then ran after hoping no one saw me.... it made for a fun Tuesday afternoon. The first part, the glow-in-the-dark stars sucked though because without a flash and in the dark the stars didn't show up on camera. So I had to get creative and spin some glow sticks around to get some crazy pictures, but I think it still worked out.

So after I got all my footage, I couldn't do anything until I got my computer back Wednesday. I had to put the pics on the computer and edit them to the "Cartoon" look. Then I had to rush to the edit lab and edit it all together. By about 8:30pm I was adding my audio track and next was going to print to video when the computer froze. Apparently everytime I hit "save" it stopped working after about half way through so I had to restart at 8:30 (an hour remaining) at the half way point. I rushed to get done and finished at 10:15. I thought for sure I was going to be late and it would be over. Even though it took me four different computers and two different tape decks, I got it done and got there at 10:30 to find out we hadn't started and didn't start till about 11:15. I was just glad I got everything done in the midest of the choas that was going on that week and I think the final product was great. Except for Joselyn stealing my audio track for her one minute film too... ha. Anyways, it definitely was a great experience to do this! One of the funnest things I have had to do for a class.

LWR