Ridic was the first to come up with the idea to make a skit about newscasters, and we wrote the entire script over the phone. Most of the production work naturally fell on ridic because he had better access to filming equipment and the relative complexity of his scenes. Because of this I did the majority of post production. During filming I created a news intro in blender and made Ridic’s background photo using the same file. Then I shot my scenes with help and equipment from ridic. After Ridic cleaned up the raw audio I put all of the clips together and added the music and effects to make the final product.

In the end, working with a partner taught me a lot about the actual process of filmmaking, how to work with a team, and how to complete a project you don’t have full control over.

Credits:
Police voice: Joshua Van Horn.
Please standby effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG770qn8A9Q
Music: https://freesound.org/s/468213/

Most of my favorite movies have plots that sound completely stupid on paper, but have a nearly perfect execution that makes them profound. I figured I would take a shot at something like this when I’m young and no one cares. So I decided to make a surreal (and thankfully exaggerated) video about my experience doing VFX in blender. I started with recording most of the live action stuff first, then doing some screen capture with shadowplay. About a third of the way through I had to re-format my hard drive to avoid a major computer catastrophe. Nearly giving me a heart attack and wasting almost a full day of my time. I spent more time than I expected to on editing because I wanted to emulate the heavily edited montage like style of directors like Guy Ritchie.

In typical Quinn Brown fashion I got in WAY too over my head for this project. At the beginning I knew I wanted to read a passage from an HP Lovecraft story so I chose to read from “The Festival” because of it’s descriptiveness and the fact that it’s one of his more underrated short stories. The story is about a young drifter who returns to the town of his ancient ancestors, but when curiosity gets the better of him he’s ensnared in a dark ritual known only as the festival. The first major problem that I encountered was the fact that the scene described in the paragraph I chose is meant to be almost completely silent. This meant that I had to try my best with simulating the ambiance of the scene by making it sound like a large group of people quietly walking past the listener. I’m not completely happy with the result but I should have known from the start that it would be hard for someone with as little experience as me to mix a scene like this.

By: Quinn Brown