And… We’re Back! at Smash or Trash Indie Filmmaking

And… We’re Back!

0 Comments Published February 25th, 2014 in Current News and Events

Okay… So we have re upped for another year. This weekend – March 1st – marks the 6th year of the website! So we have a little bit going on.

Dr. Les Bradley of our staff has some cool things to bring to indie filmmakers. First up is a link he found on Robert Redford‘s take on the 30 years of the Sundance Independent Filmmaking Festival. The link to this article can be found HERE.

Next up is a tip that Dr. Bradley found out about video camera memory cards. Here is what he found out: “Write-Protect your SDHC card prior to loading into a card reader for your computer! Your Mac will see the SDHC card as a No Name Drive and immediately try to index the card. In indexing the card, it will try to write data to it. If you have not write protected the card, you could lose some of your footage as the Mac does this indexing.”

Article from Robert Long II: Next up is a wonderful 1989 Batman fan film done by Mike Johnson and Tim Tokarz. They did an incredible job making a love letter to the 1960s Batman television series. Now while this was well done, admittedly they only had late 80s video and editing equipment to work with. What I did was download this fan film and re-edit it using the tools available today. I used Adobe Premiere 5.5, and I made new PNG stills to insert into the revamped fan film in Adobe Photoshop.

Besides fine tuning the audio and color correcting the old video (as this was downloaded from Youtube there is only so much that can be done) I tightened the space between the scenes to make them go a little faster. The biggest thing I added was the the fight action words that pop out during the action sequences, as well as the digital matte paintings that help create Gotham City and the Batcave – both inside and out. These were all created by by PNG files that were imported into Premiere, and were animated on the various layers within that program.