Vegas-cut movie wins award

Sullivan wrote on 10/17/2005, 10:51 AM

Last night, my short film "Cleveland In My Dreams", cut on Vegas, was awarded "Best of Fest - Short Movie" at the Bare Bones Script-2-Screen Film Festival in Tulsa, OK.

www.script2screenfilmfestival.com

It was also awarded "Best Comedy Film" by the Route 66 Film Festival in Springfield, MO.

There is a certain amount of compositing including one scene where 3 pieces of video are inserted into a still image and pan/crop is used to move the "camera" over the composite. There is also some green-screen which was a nightmare due to my failure to preview the key at the shoot when I could have adjusted the lighting.

Because we used multiple microphones, I also used Vegas to record the audio at the shoot. I assembled the music in Acid. I built the Foley tracks directly in Vegas.

www.clevelandinmydreams.com

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/17/2005, 10:59 AM

Very cool, Sullivan! Thanks for posting. I'm kinda keeping a "loose list" of films making waves with Vegas.

Grazie wrote on 10/17/2005, 11:00 AM

Congrats! - Any chance of seeing some of it? - Please? - G

Sullivan wrote on 10/17/2005, 11:05 AM

Here are trailers:

http://www.clevelandinmydreams.com/PressKit/Trailers.html

I'll cut an excerpt of the aforementioned composited scene for you guys but won't be able to get it online until this evening.

mjroddy wrote on 10/17/2005, 12:21 PM

I look forward to it.
Congratulations on the wins! That's awesome news all around! Good for you!

Sullivan wrote on 10/17/2005, 6:38 PM

Here is an excerpt that includes the process shot. It's 1Mb/s so you might have to download it and play it offline.

http://trailers.sparkdigitalmedia.com/CIMD/Excerpt.wmv

The idea of the shot is that Feverell (orange shirt) is talking about his dream and we are cutting back and forth between the dream and him sitting in the restaurant describing it. The process shot portrays the camera travelling from the dream to "reality" in a single shot to underscore the entanglement of dream and reality that is at the core of the story.

The "real" building this was made from has only 2 stories so the third floor was added in PhotoShop. Also, the restaurant interior is really clear across town from the exterior.

To make the glass doors swing open, I let them swing closed and reversed the shot in Vegas. So the dolly ran backwards, the bartender walked backwards, etc.

I wanted to use an acceleration curve on the camera motion, but I couldn't make the motion of all the pieces match up when I turned on smoothing.

I also had to roto a monitor out of 160 frames of this shot. I did this by exporting the frames to Photoshop, modifying them, and re-importing them.

This excerpt is going to give you the wrong idea about the movie. It's strictly PG.