ghosts of the past

part i

my pre-ordered from the nin website copy of ghosts i-iv arrived yesterday. trent said that they went into making this album with the intent that it could/should be the soundtrack to something. on march 13, he announced a ghosts film festival on youtube. holding the actual release in my hands, i noticed it was published under a creative commons license. this makes sense for the film festival thing, but also sets of a sort of chain reaction in my brain about a whole lot of other stuff…

ghosts i-iv

creative commons basically means that you can use it freely in your stuff without having to find the copyright holder (often a faceless agency such as a publisher or distributor when it comes to music, not even the artist themselves) and ask permission. and as i am listening to the cd, instantly i start playing scenes in my head from movies that don’t exist yet, and, also, from my senior project translucent

part ii

i used a couple tracks from the fragile (at least one) for specific dramatic impact in translucent. i used several other copyrighted songs in it without permission. i’m a bad, bad boy. but i also knew i wasn’t ever going to do anything with the movie and there’s only 3 songs in the whole of it that used big label artists (nin, radiohead, and the cure). everything else was fairly indie and i figured i could probably actually contact the artist and get permission. as part of the group project i got a full album of music submitted from one of my students that i always wanted to use in the soundtrack (since, you know, that was the intent). and i made some music, too, that would work.

so, this idea of putting ghosts to film made me start thinking again about revisiting my movie, which, yes, regurgitating something old is somewhat uncreative, but i was never fully satisfied with the result and i always knew i could produce something a lot better given more time.

part iii

i graduated in may 2001. translucent was part of my senior project which means that 2011 will be the 10 year anniversary. granted i finished the film before may, but we’ll call may 2011 the 10 year anniversary. so, i’ve decided that i want to produce a 10 year anniversary edition of translucent. this entails:

  • re-capturing all the recorded video
    • this means getting a new video capture device or somehow making the old one i have work — it’s no longer supported by just about anyone
  • editing all the footage
  • adding in soundtrack stuff
  • doing any other post-production stuff like special effects
  • re-recording voiceovers (i wanted to do it myself the 2nd time around so i could take more time and rewrite the script. i don’t think my voice is that different from peaches’ if it’s disconnected like a narration.)
  • digitizing the results and creating a dvd
    • i’m also thinking that i want to digitize my 3 super 8 films that i hand-edited from my first film class to put on as “bonus features” and of course include the making of video. maybe even director’s commentary if i can figure out how to do alternate audio tracks. that might be a bit of overkill though…

basically all the fun stuff. okay, making the movie is the fun stuff, but post-production is fun too. and while this is yet another project on top of an already-busy schedule, my timeline is to be done by may 2011, which is far enough out that i think i can do it. and gives me (hopefully) enough time to work on making it actually look good. hell, maybe when all’s said and done i can sell copies.

so the plan is to use ghosts, myself, peaches’ soundtrack, and any other creative commons music i can find, in addition to stuff i can actually get permission for for the soundtrack. and maybe i can even look into entering it into some kind of film festival. i’m not gonna do sundance, but something, maybe. we’ll see…


by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.