Making the film company

It started with hundreds of interesting ideas over a period of years. Unfortunately, most of those ideas have been forgotten. Always write your ideas down! But new ideas are born every day so no excuses!

How to start a film company: (at least, how we did it)

• Buy a camera
• Shoot Something
• Edit it
• Upload it somewhere

So my nephew Dale bought a cheap HD camera for under $200 and a $15 plastic Tripod. My wife DeeDee came up with the "Your baby can *insert funny idea here* as sort of a loose parody of the popular "Your Baby Can Read" videos. Since we do have a very cute, and smart 15 month old baby, the way forward was clear.

First, however, we wanted to test the camera and find out if we were even capable of making a decent film. I came up with the 'Alien Abduction' comedy short and we started preparing to shoot. I was too lazy to write a script (as with all our film shorts so far) so we just went with it. One long take of Dale sitting at the laptop and one long take of me mocking Dale while standing nearby. I bought a 99 cent white poster board, attached it to a speaker stand (from my band's PA system), and attached to work lights to it and pointed them at the white board. This helped to warm up the lighting in the room. I then built a sort of instant boom mic with a microphone stand and a condenser mic.
I recorded the sound signal into a mixer which would eventually be loaded into the computer as a wav file.

After shooting, the EDITOR fiasco began. How would I cut and edit the movie? As a giant fan of Linux and Open Source software, I chose Kdenlive for it's advanced features. I was able to edit both the Aliens film and Baby Can Burglarize with Kdenlive, but not without massive difficulty. Our films survived literally hundreds of crashes. Yes, Kdenlive was very unstable for me. During the editing of our most recent film, Your Baby Can Hack Computers, we went through weeks of difficulty. I sold my best guitar amp and bought a computer. A zoombox or something. Not powerful enough - back to Fry's. Then bought a quad-core Gateway. Had that for a few days until DeeDee tripped over a keyboard cable, sending the computer flying. Back to Fry's. Replaced the computer and started again. I re-edited the film from scratch in the following editors:

Kdenlive
Openshot
Sony Vegas Pro (cracked)

I'm not even sure which one won out, but I was VERY glad to get the most recent film uploaded to YouTube, to join our other shorts.

I will continue the story in the next blog entitled: Will the real editor please stand up?