Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

I'm confident that the audio quality will be good. My skills lie in that area. One of my fears is that the video would be so much worse in quality than the audio that it detracted from being a showcase and instead just showed itself being a bad film. I'm hoping to avoid that by keeping it simple.

In the end, I shot some footage myself, but wanted different backgrounds. So I resorted to some public-domain footage for the background. I searched a few repositories including archive.org, being careful to check the licences for each. On some of the sites, it's not simple to search for the relevant licenses. I'm not actually convinced that all the clips have the correct license so it pays to be more careful and not include a clip you're not sure of.

I tried using ZS4 for the green screen chroma-keying. There's an awkward process of converting movies to be usable within the application. I like what they're trying to do, but from a usability point of view, it was awful. They seem quite open about the fact that ZS4 isn't their focus. It's good that they've written that because we can make some judgement about how much to rely on the software and the arrival of future updates . I saw Adobe Premiere the other day and within a few minutes I was making it do what I wanted. No manuals, no instruction. It was just so much easier. But I guess that's part of what you pay for. 

There was also a bug in the process that meant that the background chromakeying wouldn't work for more than 3-4 minutes of the video. I didn't get to the bottom of whether it was user error or an application error. I just found it too troublesome to work through and I had other projects that needed working on.

So that's where the production process has stopped. Shooting's complete, the score is complete, but I couldn't get the full chromakeying to work. 

I'm a regular user of Ubuntu; I use it for the company server and I personally use it for a HTPC. I'm going to look into Ubuntu Studio (or possibly just installing the applications on a base installation). With the little time it now takes to install a basic Ubuntu distribution, I'll probably go for Ubuntu Studio and have a couple of hours figuring out the video applications. If that doesn't work out quickly enough, it'll go on the back-burner until I've some more slack-time. 

I'll keep developments posted. I hope to get the short's premiere in one of the area's movie clubs towards the middle of 2008. After that, I'll post it on this site with a description of how it was made and, more importantly, how I approached the score and why I made the decisions I did.