The Making of "Wasted"

      After all the troubles we had with Star Wars: the Fate of the Sith, I thought I would never want to make another movie. But soon the disgust towards movie making caused by our infuriating Star Wars movie wore off, and I found myself, one late night, directing another movie, and then many late nights after that editing it, soon making ourselves another Short movie.

      The whole idea for this Short started with a school contest. The contest was to make a movie, work of art, or song about driving smart (so wearing your seat belts, not driving drunk, looking both ways, and all that jazz) So I started writing a song called “baby look the other way before crossing”... not really... at first I actually told myself it wasn't worth making a movie. Then later that week my friend came up to me and convinced me that we should make a movie, win the prize money, and get famous (at least in our school) So I agreed, compiled some ideas, called some people, and then filmed from 8 till 11 that night. Filming went the smoothest it has ever gone in Comv history, everyone pitched in ideas, and we turned out with, what I think a very nice convincing plot.

      Well after everything was filmed I was left to editing, so we started right away (did I mention the contest deadline was 3 days from when we filmed) I started with doing a rough cut, so we knew what scenes we were keeping and which ones we were not. Then I had the actors do their voice-overs, and then added the proper effects to make their voices sound like they fit the footage. Then everyone left and again I was on my own for the next few days, editing away. I went through and foleyed all the audio, adding walking, liquids swishing around in bottles, sticks/bottles being placed down, hands being hit together and many more. For a movie that is only one and a half minutes long it sure did have a lot of audio tracks, 13 to be exact. After the audio was done I made the muzzle flash. It took me about an hour to add all the elements of the gun, which includes the smoke from the barrel, the bullet casing being ejected, and the gun slide sliding back. Then the finishing touch was to add a small camera shake to the footage to show the power of the gun. And that was it for the muzzle flash.

      Last, after the audio and the flash were complete I tightened up the cuts so that all of movie flowed smoothly together, then I went through and touched up the footage. The “touching up” makes all the difference, if you look below and move your cursor over the image, you will see what the footage looked like before and after the “touching up”. As you can tell there is a major difference, I added some color correction to tint the movie the color I wanted it, added some contrast, and placed a slight “glow” on the footage so that it resembled the way that 35mm film (the film used in professional movie) records light. This adds a more cinematic look to the movie and adds a mood to the scene's.

      Then that was it, I finished the movie the night before it was due (sounds like another one of our movies huh?)I rendered it, and then took it to my school. They reviewed it, told me it was violent, but that it got the point across. They took it to the administration panel of our school district. They approved it and then I played it to the whole school, and am still waiting to see if I won the contest or not. But that's it for our new Short titled Wasted. so go view it in the cinema and in the mean time play with the picture below.