Lazy Sunday: A Perfect Shutter short film for Still Motion contest

Alright, I finally have a few minutes to write up about the short film contest.  The goal was to create a short film that follows the guideline of stillmotion and adhere to the same time restriction that stillmotion staffs are allow to have.  It seems like their staff is only allow to have 3 hours to work on this project.

My initial thought was that it would be somewhat difficult. But after shooting the film, I realized how bloody time consuming this really is.  As you can see from the film, the concept is quite simple.  I grab my wife to do a couple midshot, closeups and detail shots.  Then add in music and finally do some color grading.  However, my wishful thinking quickly went down the drain.  The simple shots took roughly 1 hour.  Then I have to convert my footage to Neoscene format since I’m editing in Adobe Primere. It took me another hour to find the song and license it through AudioJungle. After that I must scrub through all the footage to grab the key moments that I want and match it to the music.  For some reason, the music have some techno sound mid way through so I have to use Adobe soundbooth to remove that.  Finally, I had to color grade the whole thing to crush the blacks a little and bring the color back out.  How long did the whole process take?  Try 5 1/2 hours!

This took way too long for such a simple concept.  The funny thing is, I can easily go over 8 hours if I wanted to make tweaks and enhance the result some more.  Fortunately, I didn’t win so now I am going to get our team to try to come up with something more epic that can compete.  We are really excited about doing this next piece. Stay tuned for our next contest.  =)