Something witty should go here...

I'd like to take you on back to October 2005, Red Ribbon Week to be exact. Our school held a little contest for students to make short 30-60 second videos about RRW. Well, I guess they didn't do a very good job, because my good friend Tim Sazama and I were the only ones to make one. To be honest, he was the one who wanted to make it, I was just the one with the means to do it. Anyway, we through that together in an evening and they showed it to the school. Somehow, people thought it was good, and I was interviewed (for the second time, the first being Movie Spoof 2) for our school paper. To our disappointment, they never interviewed Tim, which I even told them to do in my interview.

Now, a couple weeks down the road, Tim and I get called to the principal's office. We go in, and they explain that they're going to be doing their usual rules refresher video at the end of the semester. I mean, this is a boring video that our principal even admitted she never really liked. She said during the meeting about it, our names came up, so they wanted us to make something fun and interesting for the students to watch before we leave for Christmas break. Okay, hell yeah! Tim's imagination was running off right there and I was instantly given an excuse to get my Mac now, instead of February when I would normally get my savings money. All the grandchildren in our family have savings accounts that they get the money from either when they graduate, or turn 18, whichever comes first. So I go home, explain to my dad that I don't have the hard drive space (nor can I spare any) to make this film, so we set out to get the money from my grandma. Long story short, she let me have my money and a week later, I had an iMac G5 and Final Cut Pro, ready to roll.

Well, needless to say, we put this off quite extensively, as I hail myself the king of procrastinators every now and then. We ended up borrowing a GL2 from a video company that my brother worked for (technically a competitor of the company I worked for at the time, but I never saw that (they did weddings, we hadn’t done weddings in years)), and we shot this thing over the course of 3 days. Tuesday night, and Wednesday-Friday, each of us giving up our lunch periods and staying until five o'clock some days. We were real lucky in that I had both lunch periods (fourth and fifth) open, allowing me (the camera guy) to shoot stuff with Mike fourth period and Tim and Ryan fifth period. Then we could all get together and shoot bigger scenes after school.

Every night, Tim would come over to my house with me (he wouldn't actually go home each day until 11 or 12 at night) to help edit. We would capture our stuff and do a rough cut of whatever we could the day of shooting, then write down what we had left. We ended up doing most of the heavy editing and VFX work that weekend. So our production came down to shooting Tuesday-Friday and editing and making the DVD by Sunday night, because we had to turn it in Monday and it would be aired that Thursday. This is where my extensive Adobe Premiere experience came in handy, and I was able to transition to FCP with no problem whatsoever.

Anyway, back to the film...That Thursday was an interesting day. The coolest moment for me was coming out of second period, and seeing my old Digital Magic Pictures logo plastered on every TV in the school. In our forum (lobby area when you enter the school, which you see in the opening shot), there were TV's all around it that displayed announcements every day. My logo was on all of those...and it was a cool sight to see. It was interesting experiencing the reactions of everyone in my home room as we watched it, but the school did the most retarded thing on top of all this...they cut our advisement period to a short advisory (a 10 minute period, when our film is 15 minutes) instead of long advisory (20 minutes) AND decided to give the sophomores a survey during that time as well [face_rolling_eyes]

Anyway, we got our little week and a half of glory until we went on Christmas break, and after that it kinda died down, kinda to my relief, as I'm not one to take large amounts of congratulatory comments and whatnot (I do roto/paint work to put it into perspective). Later on, it's popularity sparked a bit. An art contest out of town toward the end of the year had a video category, and my art teacher bugged me to enter The Rules - First Semester.  Among some photography and traditional art work I won some ribbons with (I'll post those later this month, when I get them back), The Rules - First Semester took Judges Merit, meaning it was chosen as the uber-best out of everything at the entire show.