Guest Post from Sid Yadav:From a Shoestring to a Flick
My name is Sid Yadav, and I’m from Queenstown, New Zealand. I heard about this contest a few months ago from the official press release, and looking at the prizes, only one thing, as a film-maker hobbyist, came to my mind: I have to enter.
So, fast forward a few weeks later, I finally got the time to start the project. I had been thinking of ideas for the entry so I started to draft a script. My initial script isn’t what the end project looks like now, as certain limitations occurred when I started production which caused me to drastically modify the script. None the less the script was a great starting point.
After scripting, we came up with a storyboard for the ad, which we digitized using a great storyboarding software called StoryBoard Artist from PowerProduction. If you’ve worked on any sort of project before that involves moving pictures, you would know how much pre-planning helps. I’ve had too many failed attempts in which — a terrible male mentality — I just wanted to “get on with it,” and the last thing I could think about was planning and sorting things out beforehand. Of course, I didn’t want this project to be that way, so we took all the precautions and steps necessary to carefully draft out each scene and event.
For the ad, we have several shots of the computer screen in which the character is using an online webmail site on a web browser (other than Firefox). For this, in an effort to not break any copyright or trademark laws, we had to obviously make our own. This could be known as pre-production, since we needed a static, fake webmail site and a web browser with fake icons and interface in the footage and also by itself [fullscreen]. So, we used Adobe Photoshop to carve out a ‘fake interface’ for the web browser, which we called “kIDWeb Navigator,” and the webmail site, which we called “KiDMail123.” As you can see, we were quite sure we weren’t breaking any trademarks here.
Next, after storyboarding, script drafting and some pre-production, we set a date for the shoot and with about 200 takes (yes, it did really takes that much), we finished filming in about four or five hours. We used a Panasonic PV-GS180 camera (films MiniDV) which provides exceptional quality, a tripod on a home-made wheelchair dolly, and some cheap — but powerful — lights from a local hardware store. It did really get hot while filming, since the space was exceptionally small and the lights — meant for drying paint — didn’t help at all, but it’s one of the things we had to cope with. For our computer-scenes, we used an AV-out from the graphics card to the camera to capture and also some camera-on-the-screen shots.
Once we had the footage, due to our laziness, we starting post-production and editing a few weeks later. We transfered all the footage to Sony Vegas 6.0 — which we decided to use for editing — and got together a full ad. The problem was, it was 1m:20s, much, much longer than the outlined 30 seconds. So, what else could we do than than to chop the story. With some ingenious editing, we were able to change the storyline from the footage itself, make it equal to about 34 seconds, and still carry out the same intended message.
Lastly, after some fine-tuning over the next couple of weeks, we submitted the entry and sent over the full-sized DVD to Mountain View, CA, USA — thousands of miles from where we originally created the ad. So, this is how we went about creating an ad on a shoestring without spending a dime on it. Note that everything used to create this ad — from the tripod to the software — we already owned.
~ Sid Yadav
