The Berrics Push Editing Contest

There is a contest that was put on by a skate company called The Berrics. The contest, called the Push Edit, asked those participating to download some footage of skateboarding and re-edit the footage into a video. There were no directions besides this. Participants were allowed as much creative freedom that they wanted.

I've been working with action sports filmmaking since I was in the 8th grade. I've done both snowboarding and BMX bikes, but never skateboarding. However these different types of action sports for the most part had a pretty straight forward recipe. This involved weaving lifestyle shots with scenes of tricks being performed. The focus of the film was on the tricks, as these represent the most interesting thing in an edit. Here's an example of one of my short edits that I made two years ago: 


Reverse Apathy from Wendell Frink on Vimeo.

To me, this is the way to go with action sports videos. It gives a nice combination of lifestyle and trick shots, with a majority of the clips being of tricks. With the Push Edit contest, many contestants entered in their films but emphasized lifestyle shots in slow motion, heavily edited trick shots, or had more lifestyle shots than trick shots. This really took away from the part that mattered: the skaters performing their tricks. Here are several examples:



The Berrics Push Edit Submission from Andrej Bucalo on Vimeo.



Now I'm not knocking these individual's ability to edit, just commenting on the fact that these videos are emphasizing the wrong parts of the video which make it difficult to follow and less like a skate film.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

Last week, I wrote a post about the trailer for the upcoming Captain America sequel. I decided that I really enjoy dissecting trailers and everything they hold, so this week, I'm doing it again with The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. This time, though, I won't be focusing on the dialogue. That's because, well, there really isn't any.

The Dialogue
There's a million different ways a person can edit together a trailer. One of the biggest decisions the editor has to make is which dialogue they are going to feature in the preview to their film. Many editors choose to use very many of the most climactic, the funniest, or the most inspirational quotes to draw in movie-goers. The editor(s) for this trailer, however, decided to take the completely opposite route.

He/she/they chose to use absolutely zero lines of dialogue throughout the entire trailer; that is, until the last five seconds when Ben Stiller asks a man if there are any car available to rent and the man replies "Yeah. We have a blue one and a red one." These five seconds could either serve to emphasize the fact that the film is indeed comical at times, or could serve to represent some sort of change in Stiller's character (the majority of the film appears to be bluish, so choosing the red car could mean that Stiller eventually goes for change or wishes to stand out--it's a long shot, I know).

Either way, the lack of dialogue in the trailer leaves a lot to viewers' interpretation. Yes, this is a remake of a 1947 film, but who knows how closely the writers will stick to the original? Any character or voiceover telling me what's happening, I'm sitting there wondering why the pictures on the walls are moving. I'm wondering who the girl is who Stiller keeps looking at. I can make whatever assumptions I want, but the fact that I'm so intrigued to find the answers to my questions that I'll go see the movie in theaters means the editors did their job.

The Coloring
Wow. How about that coloring?! Everything's blue! I honestly don't know what to say about it besides the fact that it is simply stunning.

I mean, seriously! Hot damn!

Since IMDb is telling me that the film is an Adventure/Comedy/Drama, I'm not quite sure what kind of response the coloring is supposed to draw from viewers. With a drama, it would make a whole lot of sense. The blue adds a bit of bleakness and sadness to the overall emotion of any film. How the blue is intended to interact with the adventure and comedy of the film is beyond me. Maybe I'm looking too far into it? It's possible, but I'd like an answer, nonetheless.

The Storyline
Here's another thing about this trailer I know very little about, but intrigues me, nonetheless: the storyline. It doesn't give anything away! I have personally never seen the original Walter Mitty, so I have absolutely no foundation of understanding when watching this trailer. I've tried my absolute best to avoid asking others about it, too. Since this trailer has intrigued me so much, I want to go into the theater with nothing but my own expectations. Here's what I've deduced from the trailer: man is bored with life, man is bored with job, man likes girl at job, man imagines going on adventures, man eventually goes on adventures. I could be wrong, and I hope that I am. I'd really like to be surprised with some kind of surreal, unexpected plot that just shocks everyone.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty has an incredibly enticing trailer. Its cinematic beauty manages to give away very little with the extreme lack of dialogue, and I can't wait to see what I've been waiting for when it comes out this Christmas.

Project Update

Hannah, Courtney, and I finished all of our shooting on Wednesday. Due to the wind and the time of day, it was a difficult shoot, but we were able to get all the shots we needed. Even though it was sunny on Wednesday, the angle we were shooting from caused us to need to wait for cloud coverage. As a result, some color correction will be needed for a few scenes, but they are very brief shots, so it should not be too difficult. We are going to work on that portion together and use the processes we learned in class in order to make sure we do it correctly.

I have most of the project edited together as a rough cut and the only scenes missing are the two new scenes we shot on Wednesday. So I will be making our final edits to the rough cut and then editing it down even more today and tomorrow. Once I finish the editing process, Hannah, Courtney, and I are planning on getting together to work on final corrections, transitions, and color correction. I want to make sure we are all happy with the outcome since we have dedicated so much hard work and effort to the project, so that's why we will definitely have a group meeting before the project is due. We will also be working on all the necessary paper work and plan to be done by tomorrow night so that if anything goes wrong, we have Sunday to fix it. Overall we are on track to finish by tomorrow night, and as a group are very happy with our overall content and product.

Project Update/Final Project

Last weekend we finished the filming for our second project. Right now I'm finishing cleaning up the sound and figuring out what type of music, n be suitable for this film. Tomorrow we're supposed to finish editing the whole thing.

My idea for a final project is still mostly in the works, however what I've got so far is an odd mix between an Irish ghost story, "Night on Bald Mountain" (from Disney's Fantasia), and the kids book "The Bunny's Ball".

The basic premise is that in a small town, there's a local legend about the dead rising from their graves and dancing on a certain night of the year. As usual the younger generation doesn't believe this and one night a couple of them go out to prove the stories wrong.

However around midnight they DO see the dead dance, and are caught spying on them. The Devil who precedes over the  dance sets up a court case to damn the teens. As they are about to be sentenced, the suns rises and church bells ring. Banishing the ghosts, devil, goblins, ect, back to the darkness, from whence they came.