Accomplishment

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October 2, 2015

1st Place Win Southwest Indiana Film Festival

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What if there was a package?

2015 was a big year for me as far as creative growth, this was the year that I started continuously working on videos. Together, me and my production partner Brandon made several videos in an effort to improve our production skills. Our goal was to win the second South West Indiana Film Festival. Spoiler alert. We did, but it wasn’t easy. A lot of hard work and dedication went into producing our first major film “The Courier.”

Like most video ideas, this one came after hours of brainstorming and sadly could only be boiled down into a single question. “What if there was, like, a package?” Then we were off, into creating the outline for a Sci-Fi Action film about a package courier. Then it was time to write a script. We went through 5 different versions of the script, each better than the last, well maybe not the second version. Next it was time to get tedious and start planning: casting, call sheets, schedules, and spreadsheets, so many spreadsheets. I find this part, oddly satisfying.

Preproduction for the Courier was a test bed for shorter videos that we used as a way to figure out how to do things like fight scenes or any type of action really. A few shorts of the shorts we made to test these ideas can be found online and at the bottom of this page.

Once everything was planned, it was time to shoot, and that’s what we did. I had a fantastic time, and in all honesty, this was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. And the all the footage turned out great. But the one major lesson I learned from shooting was that no matter how much you plan, something can and will always go wrong. In this case, it was rain. Weather in general can be your worst enemy, so make sure to schedule extra production days for to get around these problems.

If you’re wondering what equipment we used. We took a low budget approach. Our main camera was the Canon T5i with a standard 18-35 kit lens, as well as a 75-300 Canon lens. Our sound situation is also pretty low tech. We used some $15 Sony Lav mics wired into a couple Zoom H1 handheld audio recorders, in addition we used a Rode NTG2 shotgun mic run into a Zoom H4n audio recorder. For lights, we just used a few can lights from Home Depot with some LED bulbs with built in dimmers.

As for post-production, we use the Adobe Creative Suite, so Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Audition, and After Effects. This was a long process for Brandon since he was busy with the edit and a lot of VFX. As for me, I was in charge of making posters and other promotional images for the film as well as working on a few of the VFX. Luckily the end product turned out great, and we won a cool trophy for it!