Sorry for the broken narration, this post wasn’t written in one setting; rather it was written, re-written, edited, trashed, deleted, recovered, and mucked up over a period of two weeks…and I’d like to roll the credits first…
You may either watch the video streamed here, or go to its Yahoo! Video page. I won’t mind if you leave a rating / comment or two. 😉
[yahoo 2176245]
I’d like to mention the efforts of the following people in the project:
- Myself, for being a conceited enough asshole to included myself in a credit list I’m putting up. I did do a LOT of work and coordinating though, including the recording, sound editing, and video wrap up. 😛
- Eeshan, for staying back on the last day till 9pm (and preventing me from freaking out on that day), and earlier doing still photography and sound editing.
- Rachit, for (shaky) camera work (which turned out to be good), and video editing initially. He’s a pro on Movie Maker, if that means anything…
- Waris, for downloading so many software, songs, providing stills and for photography. I feel sorry that he went down sick during the last few days.
- Srishti, for providing such an exhaustive list of soundtracks, providing inputs during the final stages of sound editing, and generally controlling tempers when she was around.
- Prannoy, for leaving his Gmail ID logged in so I could send a “I’m a fool” message from his account to the whole contact list.
- Vivek, for laughing maniacally in the first meeting, and then not coming in protest.
- Nayonika and Nithin, for making life miserable for me by blowing extra quantities of air into the mic while recording, and a drab monotone while doing that too.
- The teachers and associated staff, including Pooja ma’am, Sangeeta ma’am and Satpal sir, for all their support.
- Anshul, for worrying about copying Exun, which we did, finally.
- Hostel food crew, for making bland and tasteless food, and thus giving me a valid excuse to go to Cafe Coffee Day.
After more than two weeks of high voltage tension, we finally completed the school’s annual day video. In the end, it was so much work, that I actually feel like studying now, which rarely happens in my case…
It also happens that due to all this, I’ve missed full two weeks of classes now that I’m in real deep shit, with my final exams coming up soon too, plus school shutting down leaving practically no path for me to get my doubts clarified. Good thing I guess, I can be Vice President of some club next year in school then…
The team started off with the four – me, Rachit, Eeshan and Waris, later joined by Srishti; with me as the team leader. I wanted more people in – Illusion for CW for example, but he was still cribbing about his iPod. Our first task was to watch the shitty video made two years ago for the 10th anniversary celebrations. Wow, that one was real boring. We needed footage for our own, and the school, very conveniently, told us all this just two weeks away from D-Day. The team, by now we’d started calling ouselves the VidZards (note – this was NOT my idea), asked for a good handycam, and all we got was some monolithic tape-based contraption from the Flintstones prop material…
Off we went, shooting all around the school, creating nuisance everywhere and disrupting class schedules for The Greater Good Of Mankind aka Annual Day Video aka Saving Our Asses From Being Burnt. Became quite popular I guess all over the school, telling teachers that we were shooting for the ‘vidddeo’. The first casualty though happened to be my thumb, which was suspended from action for a few days. And it really hurts (pun intended) while replying to messages ‘Why aren’t you blahgging’ in such a case…
Post-camera work, we need to get Mr Flintstone’s tapes converted, and the teacher we gave it forgot to do it. Thus waited for one whole weekend until we could start work. Meanwhile, the important task of downloading oh-so-many software that we desperately required started on the school’s 512 kbps dedicated Internet connection, and I quite understand that we might have made the ISP feel sorry, downloading monstrous files, which we eventually didn’t even use because of Adobe’s silly logo in a trial version…
After getting the tapes one thing was pretty clear – Mr Flintstone’s camera didn’t record the audio properly. That was a big disaster, because that meant we could hardly anywhere use the OST. First task was to start off with an animation; eventually we dropped the animated beginning. Being the pucca Hitchhiker’s fan, I wanted a rectangular Google Earth image zoom-in to DPS VK, in the end though we ended up with a total Exun 2005 rip-off, partly because video was much easier to screen capture…
Work started soon, and we split up and selected the tracks. We were working on Adobe Premiere Pro, and had almost completed our storyboard, when we had a virus coming in from the school’s Internet lab network. And guess what, the virus was the recent one exploiting a flaw in Adobe’s PDF format. That resulted in Premiere going kaput, rendering things we never sked for, dropping frames etc. With no choice left for software, we had to turn ourselves in to The Evil Empire, and start our work on (Microsucks) Windows Movie Maker…
Apart from coordinating shooting and movie editing, I also had to record the narrations. The narrators I got threw so many tantrums around that I wanted to tear my hair out, and having a short crop, inability to do so left me even more frustrated. They were so bad that I spent hours waking long into the morning editing and smoothening out their voices…
Working like maniacs the team finally showed something to the management, and they loved it! The principal even told us to buy handycams or hardware that we required. I guess the time is not far when we get a MacBook then… 😉 It did create a major headache for us though, as we were asked to take the interviews of the heads too, just two days before the annual day. Did a lot of good for the reputation of Code Warriors though…
Lots of time spent burning ‘important soundtracks’ for the video, hmmm…
The work was completed finally, with me and Eeshan staying back till 9pm in school to get the work done. Too exhausted to say anything more…
In the end, I’d like to say that the video that we finally made was pathetic. The last one at least ensured that everyone fell off to sleep; this one ensures that you’ll stay awake thanks to the soundtracks, but still feel like sleeping due to broken storyline and drab narration…
