Stupid movies

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So, my big Christmas gift this year was Adobe CC. I'm playing around with it on old footage. My son has this crappy 640x480 flea market FauxPro and some Airsoft guns, so I took some of his footage and had a little fun with it. Tools used: Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, Speedgrade CC, and GarageBand:

 
This was a class project I did for college back in 1999. Our group had to make a commercial to sell a fake computer chip. I edited it using Premiere and Photoshop. And yes, this was filmed using a cassette tape camcorder, so that's why it looks all grainy and the sound recording sucks.

 

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I've been playing with stupid movies for years. My brother and I especially. I have used final cut express quite a bit, but this is my first time with Adobe's stuff. First time I "composed" a song from loops.

Comedy is comparatively easy to DIY. We (my brother and I) would really like to do a drama of some sort. But those are far less forgiving of errors and bad film work. Also comedy lets you get away with recycling actors.

What really makes me groan is going back and watching the analog stuff we had to edit in camera.
 

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I've been working on a more serious short. I'm trying to do it properly, so here's a treatment and a screenplay, if anyone is interested. They're almost the same, except the treatment is more descriptive and written as prose.

The elevator pitch is this: a grown man returns to his parents home to find his old nightmare waiting for him, quite literally. But it's no longer fear that interests the old monster, but new life.
 

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The treatment is three pages of Courier font with lots of white space (if you're afraid it's too long to read). I'm shooting for around 5 minutes or so here, so it's not huge.
 

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I've put a lot more work into this project. I realized (after talking with people who have more film experience) I had no hook scene, and the dad seems kind of like a dick at the end. The solution to both is the same: make the son a more central character, and have the Terror help the son as much as the son helps the Terror. Basically the son becomes the jaded kid with no interests (he already was as you can see from the bedroom scene).
 

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Check out what I spotted over my house last night!

[DOUBLEPOST=1439000171,1438999952][/DOUBLEPOST]IT'S SO REAL!!!!

For those interested, it was a daytime shot of my roof. I keyed out the sky, dropped in a night sky, threw on some levels to make the roof and trees look like they were shot at night. A crappy ufo image from the web. Some theremin music from freesound, a dust cloud pre-keyed from uh the internet, and an in-scene 3D light and a lens flare. All in After Effects CC.[DOUBLEPOST=1439000248][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh and some wiggles on the ship for life, and a wiggle on the whole scene to make it look like it was actually moving footage instead of just a still image.[DOUBLEPOST=1439000393][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh right, and the ship engine is an airplane engine layered with some dude snoring, which I thought made a nice rhythmic sweeping noise.
 

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Some more After Effects work. Following a tutorial on Videocopilot.net, and adding my own touches. Other than the textures, this is all made in AE.

 

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Sheesh. I think my life went on hold in fall 2015. Anyway. I started playing with this stuff again. Here's some CG rain on a fake window with a fake rack focus and even fake fingerprints. Straight from a tutorial, but still neat.

 
Sheesh. I think my life went on hold in fall 2015. Anyway. I started playing with this stuff again. Here's some CG rain on a fake window with a fake rack focus and even fake fingerprints. Straight from a tutorial, but still neat.

Watched whole thing. Saw no racks, fake or otherwise. 2/10 - would not recommend.
 
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