In October 2005 I made a short film entitled “Energy Crisis 2012” (view the movie online here)for the “Shoot Out Boulder” a 24 hour filmmaking contest.
My crew all had a blast making it and and we placed in the top 10 out of 60 entries! In addition to the actual 6 minutes of footage that I shot on the day of the movie, I also recorded 6 hours of “The Making of” type footage during and before the day of the competition. I had the idea that capturing the creative process on video would firstly help me get a big picture view of the filmmaking process and secondly it could help develop my documentary filmmaking skills by using the material to create a documentary on the “Making of Energy Crisis 2012”. I have never actually produced anything more than the two 6 minute pieces for the 2005 and 2006 “Shoot Out Boulder” competitions armed with 6 hours of raw footage, I could not get my hands dirty and perhaps produce something remotely watch-able!
A big problem however was that no one particular person was assigned to this parallel project. It was more of a “hit the record button on the camera” during the cast meetings and rehearsals and “see what we get” than an execution of a carefully though out plan for a documentary. Having said this and, having sat in front of the computer for 6 hours during the capture stage of this footage I can honestly say that we did get some real gems and even though the end result will be more of a spontaneous, reality type documentary than a carefully planned out one, I think it has some potential (sweet baby Jesus, I hope so!). I now have the somewhat daunting task of separating the wheat from the chaff and throwing together a 45 minute piece (or shorter) entitled “The Making of Energy Crisis 2012”.
As of the date of this post, I’m basically at the stage of having 6 hours of footage captured on a nice 400 Gig hard drive. My first thought after capturing the material is – now what! I have decided to create some article to assist me (and hopefully others) on the task at hand. There will be some editing technical type articles using my G5 Mac with Final Cut Pro and some purely non-technical ones dealing with the theory and thought process behind documentary filmmaking.