Movies

One of my fellow forum moderators on Dvinfo.net, Dylan Couper, is a digital filmmaker by profession and decided in 2005 to create The DV Challenge to encourage forum members to shoot movies, not just talk about it. Because of my work with STS-114, I was too busy to enter the first couple of competitions, but LeeAnn and I jumped in on the third episode. Work got in the way a bit again, but after I finished a week working Space Station console, we had a few days left to beg a favor from some of my co-workers. The result was our first short movie, "Self Made."

We'll be doing future DV Challenges as time allows, as well as other projects with our new Canon XL H1 High Definition camera. Stop back here periodically to see what's new!

The DV Challenge #3 entry

We shot "Self Made" pretty much off the cuff. As a first effort, it was intended to be a learning experience...and it definitely was that! With 3 days of 8 before the Challenge deadline gone by while I worked in Mission Control covering Space Station operations, I finally finished work and was able to take some much-needed vacation. LeeAnn and I quickly wrote a script, scrambled around finding a cast -- all professionals at something OTHER than acting, such as physicians, pharmacists, and engineers -- and started shooting.

As you'll see, this movie is far from technically perfect. Still, we're rather proud of it as a first effort done in a very short time with little planning. The cast were all great, as you'll see; however, we learned that next time we should spend a lot more time storyboarding, planning the scenes, and especially giving some thought to lighting the scene. That ol' "measure twice, cut once" concept. Some things weren't fixable in post, but we spent WAY too much time on the computer trying to fix lighting and audio mistakes. Great fun from beginning to end, though, and we learned a lot. And we have to say again what a great cast we had!

The small file is the 3 minute version that was submitted for DVC#3. We felt that the plot was a little too involved for 3 minutes and didn't really like our 3 minute cut that well, so we've also done a 5 minute version. This one is encoded at a higher bit rate, so will look a lot better: