We finished the 2011 race last night, and it was a fine experience! We stuck with it for the 24 hours and came up with a video that everyone is proud of. First-timer Ray Johnson joined Jason Smith, Kevin Collins, Marilyn Jolly and me for a smaller group this year. (Guerrilla division)
The required elements were:
Theme – “A Day to Remember”
Prop – a ball
Location – a garden
Line of dialogue – “We can do that tomorrow.”
Here’s the result:
The script-writing process was a group effort that took us several hours. We settled on the basic idea pretty easily, and the process was relatively smooth. We took another several hours recording the dialogue, and went out to shoot the video at 12 or 1. Jason directed the action, and several of us got to shoot the garden beauty shots. My first time to shoot with the 5D – it was a lot of fun. Back to home base for lunch break, but not for long – lots of post work to do. We may be the only team this year with custom watercolor paintings – Marilyn and Ray provided the art that you see in the credits. Jason not only gave life to the science film graphics (few if any science films were ever actually that cool), but contributed the voice of the smartest mayfly guy in the world.
Thanks, team members, for another successful year – looking forward to the screenings this week.
Something about the power of the medium in the fact that when you take a simple image and show it stubbornly and repeatedly, it starts to be more powerful.
We received the Hollywood 2nd place award at the finals May 24, 2010 (video below). Here’s our lovely glass award. Very nice.
Our post magician Jason with his little friend – taken after the awards at the IHOP – birthplace of many Video Race concepts.
We had a great time at this year’s race, and in the end we had a video that we’re very happy with.
First, the requirements:
Theme – “Acceptance”
Prop – a cell phone
Location- the front of a fast food restaurant
Dialogue- “Is that all there is?”
In the team’s history since 2001, we’ve often had repeat team members from year to year, but we’ve never had exactly the same team. Up until just before the race, it looked like we might repeat the team roster from last year, but it didn’t turn out that way. Kevin from last year’s team couldn’t make it, and we were down to five.
Now the synchronicity begins. Days before the race, Scott had talked about the event to his friend Diana. When it turned out we were short a person, he called her and left a message, asking if she would be interested in joining the team at the last minute. While we were in line at the Angelika waiting to sign in and get our badges before the race, Diana happens to walk up to Scott and say hello. She and her friend Sherry happened to be leaving a movie there. We all met and described the situation. Diana and Sherry sign on, on the spot. Both the rookies have art talents and made solid contributions to the video.
It took several hours to create and refine our idea. We had lots of discussion, disagreements, changes, re-writes, and re-considerations. It was not easy, but we all stuck with it, and eventually we had a plan we liked.
The group had met a couple of times since the last race, and we had collected short videos and films with styles, techniques, and subjects that we liked (see below on this blog), and we had come prepared to try animation as our technique. Paper and foam cutouts, collaged pictures, scissors, glue, still photos, Photoshop and After Effects. Scott and Tina voiced the characters, and Marilyn used her art talents and her fast-food squawk-box voice ( I didn’t know she could do that). Paul made sound effects with his mouth and worked on audio and video. Jason took the parts and pieces and combined them beautifully. His art direction, humor, and technical ability are the best.
All the team members multi-tasked and really kept it moving. There were times early on when I didn’t know whether or not we could finish, but the pace picked up and we had plenty of time. Thanks to Tina for keeping it all very organized.
A Day in the Life:
Update 5/18/2010 – Just got back from the first day of screenings – we’re in the finals. Good to see all our team members again and we received some nice compliments on “A Day in the Life”. More finalists chosen on Thursday and awards on Monday.
