10 Second Film

My 10 second movie is based upon the idea of a “Big Brother” style camera observing a persons every move. Originally I was going to do a Rube Goldberg style machine that ran through the apartment; much like The Bravery did in their music video An Honest Mistake. However the problem with that was the corridor in the apartment being very narrow, a good panning shot would be hard to achieve. I would also need many cameras, as setting the device back up would take far too long to do.

To complete this assignment I first had to find somewhere in my room for the camera to be able to stand and still see most of the room. Luckily the TV stand provided the perfect base for the camera to stand on top of the tripod. I told my entire apartment what I was going to be doing, as I filmed an hours worth of footage to ensure that I captured moments that would be fitting to a 10 second film.

Once I had all the footage I had to transfer the footage to the computer, which produced a very large file which brought my copy of Adobe Premiere Elements to a crawl when importing. I first cut the pieces roughly which the razor tool:

And then used the same tool to trim the footage down to their respective sizes. Once I had them and the order sorted, I proceeded which doing the fades in and out of each section to provide a smoother transition.

Adding the title and credits was the last task, after I had added the song Mad World (Instrumental) by DNS. I chose this particular song as I felt that it conveyed the feeling of how meaningless certain actions can become, as well as it being a simple yet effective piece of music, which doesn’t detract from the video footage.

In my opinion I could have improved on my film by using more effective transitions rather than a fade to black between the separate scenes of the film. I would also have planned what was going to happen in my room much more, so that I had some more interesting events occurring, as in the hours worth of footage there is not much that I could have used to produce this film.

When making the CD for presenting the film, video codec’s and standards were a problem. I had to limit size so that playback off the CD was possible, while ensuring quality isn’t effected too much. I also had to consider what is on the networked PC’s as opposed to my laptop which may have different playback abilities. Because of this, I have a higher quality version which is an AVI, as well as other versions such as a QuickTime MOV and a WMV version. I also experimented with a video converter to make a SWF and FLV flash versions, however I lack the playback ability so cannot test them on my laptop.

To submit this to 10secfilmfest I would have to change my credits to thank the people and music which is present in the film, as well as having appropriate actor release forms completed. My AVI is already in a form that they accept however, in the correct size and file format.