Tales of Wonder and Woe - DVC 22

[Mitchell Stookey]

Ok, so I feel foolish for not checking the rules before I asked my question, but I see now from the DVchallenge wordpress site, that title credits at the beginning DO count as run time. Sorry for asking before looking.

Mat, I checked out your winning entry to UWOL #16, it was gorgeous! Really excited to see your DVC submission!

[Mat Thompson]

Hi Mitchell

Uwol 16 seems like an age ago now but thanks. Yep wildlife TV is my normal stomping ground so this is a little different. This has been a great platform to start pulling a short film team together for more fictional work! - Hopefully this will be a start of more to come.

It's also nice to have it 95% complete already. Can't quite believe we managed to shoot everything last sunday....

Mat

[Lorinda Norton]

Originally Posted by Mitchell Stookey

Ok, so I feel foolish for not checking the rules before I asked my question, but I see now from the DVchallenge wordpress site, that title credits at the beginning DO count as run time. Sorry for asking before looking.

You weren't ignored, Mitchell...I just didn't see your question earlier. :)

Hoping everyone who signed up is still in the game. There is PLENTY of time if you haven't got started yet so don't give up! We have seen some fabulous entries over the years back when we were only given 10 days so...no excuses!! :)

[Andris Krastins]

Today thought of a new script, will shoot the material during the next week and edit during the following weekend.
I hope I'll manage to do it. I'll have no actors this time, so this is a new kind of a challenge for me.

[Andrew Bove]

I'm conservatively putting the over/under on defenestrations for DVC 22 at 2 1/2. Does that sound about right?

[Dick Mays]

Andrew,

Chris probably knows what you mean. He's a lawyer and has an education and probably gambling clients. But the rest of us DVCers are used to smaller words.

On a positive note, we shot 90% of our location footage before being locked out by the location owner who probably was expecting big movie stars on her property instead of our rag tag team of miscreants. (Andrew inspired that big word.) Tired but happy we survived the weekend.

[Chris Barcellos]

Sorry guys, just a little ole night school lawyer here, so I had to look that one up on Wikipedia..... With 40 entries, only two bodies through windows ??? You know there is going to be a lot of breaking, but only two or three through windows ? I bet sugar futures went way up with the announcement of the theme....

[Toni Dolce]

Love hearing the stories! I have shot about 90% of footage-just waiting on two actors to return from vacation to finish up their little bit. Admittedly, this is by far the biggest creative challenge I have ever pushed myself into doing. Thanks for providing a creative outlet for some of my ideas! My goal is to get at least 30 different glass shots/references into the movie. However, I can guarantee that not one of them will include a body going through glass or glass shattering. Since most of my movie has been shot at night, I think the biggest challenge will be in editing with eliminating the noise reduction. Deadline is coming fast!!

[Mark Hartopp]

I'm in panic mode now, I've shot 2 hours of footage in a 7 hour shoot (week ago) and then shot an extra hour a few days later which were just pick-ups or re-shoots. Man - it was stuff work filming, just me doing everything as a one man crew, didn't realize you could have a crew or cast. Having a crew would had made life easier. No spoilers at the moment.

Now I have 3 hours of nice footage stuff have half edited and still trying to squeeze it in 5mins.

[Simon Wood]

Ok, I filmed something this morning. I'll try to get it edited some time tomorrow.

I doubt it's going to be in the running, but I'll submit it for the fun of it. Are we going to be uploading to Vimeo the same as with the DVC Christmas Challenge?

[Henry Williams]

Well I'm getting there. Because of the nature of the project I might have to use a little archive footage but it's hard to explain without giving the game away. Lorinda, can I PM you to check what I'm doing is ok? What address should I use?

Henry

[Lorinda Norton]

Shoot me the details through the DVi address you'll find in my profile, Henry. I'll be glad to have a look! Better yet, send to thedvchallenge@gmail.com, then if we need to ask head guy Dylan it'll be right there. :)

Simon, submissions can be on YouTube or Vimeo.

[Mark Hartopp]

Just wondering if this is a HD only contest or can we up-load SD. Would SD be frowned up-on. I will be uploading via a mobile phone - trying to keep the numbers low.

[Lorinda Norton]

Format doesn't matter, Mark; upload any way you want!

[Andris Krastins]

So the day before yesterday I needed to shoot some scenes for my dvc entry, which I'm doing all solo with no actors.
.
I had planned to shoot at: a tiny forest river, an industrial sand canyon, a forest lake and an abandoned soviet weather monitoring station in the woods.

So after I came home after work, I took my trusty MTB, camera and tripod and headed out into the woods. The terrain is a mix of comfy dirt roads, steep and sometimes muddy pine forest trails, some lakes, sand dunes and small hills, and abandoned soviet structures and a motobike training ring.

The river part was easy (at least getting down to it). I battled with my tripod sinking in the dunes for a while, but finally I took the shot. I had planned to take a little sun too, but unfortunately it had hid behind the trees at that time, and I didn't have the time to wait for it to get in the right spot, because it was already evening and the sun was setting quick.

So I hurried to the next location (fell down the bike once, because my feet were slippery with river mud), but then had to return back to the river, because I had left in the river the one essential prop my entry needs.
Almost fell again, because the coast is very steep and slippery with mud.

Filmed all in the sand canyon, and headed towards the lake. The sun was really low now and I saw just one place where it still was shining on, unfortunately it was a good 16 meters (~52ft) drop. But then luckily I saw a tiny patch of the last sunlight with just a ~2 meter jump. Had to overexpose the shot though, because it was already getting dark despite the last rays. When I had to get back, I remembered that a 2 meter drop is a lot easier to jump from than to scale with all the gear. :)

Then I headed into the woods to find the abandoned soviet weather station (I needed to shoot its barbed wire fence), but I took the wrong trail and had to get off-road into the woods. Luckily I heard a train in the distance and new the direction to take.

When at last I found the location, I saw that damned thieves had stolen all barbed wire... So from then it was a long ride home. At the end of the day I had had a really good workout and 3/4 of my day's planned shoots taken, which is not bad.

So now I'm looking for another barbed wire fence. I'll check out some industrial sites today.


p.s. Attached a pic which I took on my crappy camera phone soon after finishing filming at the lake.