Edits & Re-Edits

I have edited and re-edit some of the footage I have shot over the years numerous times. The most revamped edits being my travel videos. It seems a little time passes and you get a new idea of how you could portray something. Your idea of the trip changes, or your skills improve, or you notice a shot that you never used and it sparks a new idea.

One of my first posts on this blog was about my video postcards, and as of today I have officially re-edited all of the videos that had originally been in that early post. For nostalgic reasons, I left the original South Dakota road trip edit that I made over a year ago uploaded, and thought it would be nice to pair it with the new one. The idea isn't ever to replace those old edits, but refine them. You'll find a lot of the same shots are used again, but the mood is different. That's the thing about traveling, you can take as many pictures and shoot as much video as you want, but it's near impossible to recreate all the excitement, frustration, wonder, joy, anxiety, etc. that you experience while there.

You can decide for yourself what you think of these two edits. I've said it before, but all of my travel footage serves as material for editing exercises simply because there's so much of it. I don't see that changing any time soon, but for now, enjoy the new edit of my 2007 South Dakota road trip as well as the original edit made last year.

NEW South Dakota Video
Original South Dakota Video

Give it Time @ Youngcuts!

I just wanted to pass on some great news that I received today. A couple months ago I submitted my short film Give it Time to the Youngcuts Festival. You may remember that Give it Time was a short I originally made for the Sasktel Video Competition in November of last year.

In the Sasktel competition I put all my efforts into promoting my film the Gizmo Tree, which turned out to be the right thing to do as it won 2nd place. However, I was left feeling like my other entry, Give it Time, despite being in the Top 10 of that contest also, hadn't reached its potential.

Today I received the email saying that Give it Time has been accepted to the 2008 Youngcuts International Festival taking place in Montreal, QC next month. It's an accomplishment I feel excellent about as I've submitted to the festival over the last 4 years, and have only had Keys to Existence be accepted at the 2005 festival in Toronto.

Give it Time is now one of the Top 100 films out of (what they said was) nearly 1000 submissions. It really makes no difference to me if it wins in its 'Best Short Film' category, as i'm just so thrilled that it'll be playing to such a large and diverse crowd.

You can check out Give it Time below:

I Met The Walrus

This short film, I Met The Walrus was nominated last year for Best Animated Short at the Oscars. You can finally see the full 5 minute film on YouTube, and it's absolutely worth it. The animation and story behind the film is so cool. Speaking of which, here's the back story:

'In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message'.