About my brand new home and our short film project (it continues!)

Howdy!

It's been a while. It's been a busy time in school, so I've been too tired to write anything comprehensible. I tried, though, but it grew and grew in length, and it's still a humongous monster in a desperate need of trimming and thus unpublishable. Perhaps sometime in the future...

Well, where does my time go?

A few weeks ago, just before my winter vacation, I moved to a new apartment. I ditched the student dormitory in favor of a apartment all my own. It's a bit further than my old one (5-8 minutes to school now, instead of 15 seconds. Still, not bad). Apartment is a lot bigger, but only 10 euros costlier. Right next to main street. I like it, but I'd like it more if it wouldn't be so messy as I've yet to unpack some of my stuff and haven't really found a place for them. My room at my parent's house is now completely empty as they brought all of my stuff here. All of my stuff. That means a lot of stuff. :P

I visited Netherlands! I went to see my sister there. Nice trip, but I'll talk about it more in some future entry. Possibly with pictures.

What takes most of my time, is, unsurprisingly school. Especially the short film project (which still travels with its working title, which roughly translates to "Then We Lived"). After a long pre-production phase, we finally start shooting next week! Exciting!

The storyboard phase was awfully arduous. Let me explain: It was useful and even required. But it took lots of man hours to do.
First version I did with PowerPoint. 150 pictures, all drawn with it. Very simple style.
The next version I photographed. It took several photo sessions with other crew members standing in for the actors. Perhaps 200 pics and 50 videos. Then we heard some feedback from our camera teacher and our screenwriting teacher, and I re-did about 30% of the storyboard. I had some trouble with finding a suitable program to arrange the photos with (and to write all the required info). I decided to use Celtx.
The final product was so enormous, that I couldn't send it to anyone via internet, even with all the zipping. I didn't have printer at the time and our school printers didn't support Celtx-format and I couldn't convert it to, let's say, PDF. I worked 6 hours, just to get the finished product out. In the end, we used memory stick and a friend's printer. The whole storyboard took at least 50 hours of work. A lot, I think.

We've been practicing for the last few weeks and I feel carefully hopeful.
All of my more innovative camera angles have worked well, though some of the scenes they featured in, got cut, and I have more confidence working with the camera (though I still tend to forget to measure the white balance so that the colors show correctly...). I've used gadgets like glide-cam and camera rig, successfully. We even improvised a snorri-cam!
We have the actors, we have the set. There's still a few areas where everything can go wrong, but let's hope for the best.

J.

My favorite song of theirs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBa9PJjqm0Q