The Payment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV6W_MnEbxE This is a little video experiment that was done when visiting my home town at Thanksgiving. I went to the bus station early to make the rush of lining up less complicated later. While at the station I mentioned to my friend I was having a coffee with that I had a new Rebel 3 that shoots video and I hadn't shot much with it and maybe something could be made up on the spot. He mentioned the tunnel between the mall and the terminal and that we could do a scene like in The Six Million Dollar Man which I understood to mean the bit where walls of a circular tunnel spin and the light or energy cause Col. Austin to lose power and fall unconscious. The technology to make the tunnel turn did not exist so I just suggested this or that shot as we go and Rob improvised as we went from point A to point B and I suggested a concept that might make use of the sequence. It has to do with memory and karma catching up. His verdict upon seeing it was "fun to watch but still makes no sense." Fair enough. A script is a good place to start, but all things considered I have seen stories that are crazier. At least it is one more exercise to use that camera, although I regret buying it because while some argue that an LCD screen is not as true for photography as an eyepiece this camera does not offer the option of shooting video that way and you MUST refer to the LCD screen regardless of whether conditions -- but it is inexplicably one that is built in or set in and can not be flipped out to make for more comfortable handling during lower shots. Along with the fact that it does not offer 24 frames per second, it has just about inspired me to revert back to my more expensive but HDV cassette utilizing HX-A1 despite its size and lack of discretion. But all things considered, I like knocking off a little movie every now and then as recreation. It's only the editing that can be annoying, since whether it is my Dell laptop or my Premiere Elements 8 there are some quirks that make previewing and seeing clean cuts almost impossible until the file is created. So it make for a few test uploads. But this seems like the end of that journey for this imperfect whim of a short, The Payment. If you don't like it, at least it is over in two minutes. I'm including both the embedded version for a visual and the link to its youtube page. Sometimes "high def" (broadly defined) crops too much in the blog, so you might prefer to just paste the link. Actually after looking at it just now indeed it does crop the film. In the beginning it looks kind of interesting to be so off center, but then someting important in right frame at the end is totally lost, a Christian fish symbol on somebody's car which provokes the only line of dialogue (improvised).