Blogging instead of working

Quick catchup, then I have to sleep.

This weekend was noteworthy in that it was the first weekend for people in my production class to shoot Project 1. As mentioned before, we're divided into A's, B's, and C's; I'm a B, the A's shot this weekend, and I helped in shooting one.

His project was very different from mine. He shot a documentary, which, while I am a fan of, I have no real idea of what goes into the production of a film of this genre. Let me say I think it went very well, and I think the end product will be very successful. However, let me also say that given the limitations of this first project, it was a little crazy to attempt.

The limits placed on us are somewhat strange, and, to be honest, have never been adequately or clearly explained. As near as I can gather the rules are as follows:
5 minute maximum for the finished film.
No sync dialogue (meaning you can't have an actor actually read a line. you can however have voice over, sound effects, sound from the set, and I'm sure some other sneaky ways to use sound).
We are limited to our 8 gigabyte SxS which translates to about 28 minutes of footage on our cameras (these cameras, rather than shoot on tapes or dvds or any other format, shoot on sony SxS cards which are extremely cool and extremely expensive, coming in at about $500 for our 8 gig)

Now, most people, after seeing that the SxS card is basically analagous to a USB drive or Flash card (in that it can be unloaded over and over again onto any computer that has an SxS reader hooked up to it) realize just how cool these cards are, essentially providing the user with unlimited footage as long as he/she is willing to dump the data every so often. However, USC has specically told us that we are allowed to only use our card to load once for this shoot. Initially, the rational could be that they want us to practice for when we only have 25 mins worth of film to shoot on, but that thinking seems to fall apart because USC also strongly encouraged us to use the in camera review method to delete bad takes off our cards.

Several of the other students have expressed confusion and even down right anger over this somewhat paradoxical policy. However, there's little to do about it. So like it or lump it is my approach. I don't think it'll matter a huge amount in my shoot, but I know for a fact it affected my friend's. If there's one thing documentaries seem to require is the ability to just let the camera roll. I'm not saying this policy made my friend's movie impossible, but it sure made that day of shooting super intense. We'd sneak off to a quiet corner or his car every so often to run through the takes and delete what we thought wasn't useable. I didn't envy him.

Today was actually pretty awesome. The morning session consisted of a lecture from one of the inventors of THX, Tom Holman. Dude, also named 5.1 sound, which many people have in their homes. 5.1 is apparently a misnomer; a more acurate name would be 5.005. This is for reasons which I do not understand, except that the subwoofer is the .1 but is really not .1 but rather .005, if that makes any sense. What was great though, was he brought amazing original cuts of Star Wars and Raiders which we got to watch on the glorious screen at Norris Theater. The cuts had obviously seen better days but it was still amazingly cool to see them. There's a lot to learn about sound, and apparently USC is pariticularly know for our sound. Something worth thinking about if you're into sound...

Alright, auditions in the morning, editing in the evening, and I'm beginning to feel sick...

Shooting this weekend.