Finally, and at long last, Nothing Travels Faster Than Bad News – the film that Vince and I spent much of last year making – is finished! I blogged the trailer in November last year, but it's taken a while to get the thing cut together and polished up, primarily because we royally screwed up the sound in a lot of instances, so Vince had to do some redubbing and all that stuff, which took ages.
But, at last, the film is as done as it's ever going to be. The first 'premiere' – if it's possible to have more than one, that is – was in Leeds last night, where the film apparently went down rather well amongst the Leeds cast, crew, and various of Vince's work colleagues. Then Vince caught the train down to Derby from Leeds, and I made the trek up from Bournemouth, and we gathered the Derby cast and crew together at Vince's friend Clare's rather beautiful house (thanks Clare!) for the second premiere.
It was great to see the finished thing, and even though I knew exactly what was coming, I still found myself laughing in all the right places. Probably helped by the fact that everyone else was too. In fact, we watched it twice, and still laughed the second time round!
I have to say, Vince has done a fantastic job of editing Bad News. It looks really fantastic and very professional – and far better than some of the shorts I've seen in my time. Coming in at 15 mins it's a bit long for a short, but it doesn't feel long because the story really carries you away (despite the poor sound in places).
I feel really proud to have been a part of this production. Thank you to everyone who helped – you all did a sterling job.
Oh, and before you ask, yes, I am trying to get Vince to format it for the intarweb and put it up online, but for the moment, you will just have to be patient. Sorry.
The Derby premiere of Nothing Travels Faster Than Bad News
Previous post: Amazing storm photos
Next post: Problem bach
ooh the suspense!
dan-uk
So…
When are you going to post the whole bloody thing on libsyn.com?
Some of us are actually interested by your whole film career thing.
Just as soon as I can twist Vince's arm! I wanna get it out there, but he has to check with the various film festivals that he wants to enter it into. Some of them expect exclusivity, which is highly annoying.
Well I did print out a submission form for iFilm.com yesterday.
The festival submission process is likely to take months and, given how much each submission costs, I'll need to pick carefully the three or four that will most benefit the film (or flip a coin, if I'm feeling apathetic). I haven't found one that explicitly forbids submissions that are already available on the internet (though many prefer world or national premieres if possible).
So, it's looking like we could post it up on-line, but the quality won't be as good as a professionally encoded videostream hosted by a site like iFilm. Though they may decide it's not good enough for free exhibition and as I'm not paying, we might have to do this sooner or later anyway.
Vince
If you get it encoded, I'll get it hosted. All you have to do is get it looking good as, say, a Quicktime movie and I'll do the rest.
Okay, I've produced a low-quality version in Quicktime that comes in at about 50MB (small picture, blocky compression and mono sound). I can probably produce slightly better Windows Media or Realmedia versions (they have more advanced exports in Premiere), but the quality really depends on the available bandwidth.
Vince
Turns out I can produce a very good Windows Media 9 version that runs to 57MB (ie. it's okay to watch full screen, though I reckon an 80MB+ would be really sweet), but I suppose you Mac types don't like wmv's.
Vince
Us Mac types can watch anything. That's what VLC is for. ;). Bung it up on yousendit.com or somewhere like that and i'll grab it and find hosting.
Okay, I'll try and produce a higher quality .wmv tonight and see how well a Realmedia export comes out. If anyone knows of a free tool that produces high quality Quicktime files from .avi's on WinXP, let me know (it'll probably use dual-pass encoding – one pass to gather statistics, then a second pass using those stats to render the video as efficiently as possible. Premiere Pro can export Realmedia and Windows Media using a dual-pass option, which is why the output is so much better than the single-pass-only Quicktime export… though I've just found 3ivx, which is cheap and may do the trick – anyone come across it?).
Vince
Comments on this entry are closed.