Projects

After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.

I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.

During my second year at university with some friends, we worked on a zombie film where my friend was a director and I was Lighting Camera Operator and editor. As a result of this, we had almost total control of the film and it was a great learning experience. Several weeks were spent preparing the script, finding actors, and testing different types of makeup. As a result of this, I was in a pub dressed as a zombie. The shooting went well and so did the editing but I committed one stupid mistake. I  didn’t leave the sound loud enough, as a result of which it’s hard to hear what’s happening. At the time of editing, I had worked in a number of stages from rough cut to cleaner cut to fine cut and sound engineering. At some points, there are eleven tracks of sound to be taken care of. It’s taken several months but I finally have the time to re-work the project. I’ve got the project file in at least one or two places on my iBook and once I get to London I’m going to transfer it over to the Macbook pro. That’s when the fun will start. I’m going to getting al the clips back online and export the video to soundtrack pro and that’s the point at which I will attempt to learn the software well enough to re-work sound once the other stages are finished. I’m looking forward to that stage because both my friend and I have been talking about re-working the sound on that short film for at least a year by now. Finally, I have the time and the resources to get on with it.

There’s a studio, three cameras, four female dancers, one male. It’s a cabaret show yet no one is in costume. That’s because it’s a practice session for those who will be using the studio in two weeks. I don’t like having a prompter on the front of the camera because it makes smooth movements harder to achieve. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get it right for the proper costumed event.