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Cloverfield short film (Vote for me :X)
Apr 22, 2008 by Wesker

Help me to win monies so that I can start up my t-shirt business.

As some of you may know, I entered a contest for the new Cloverfield DVD. The video has been approved and as of April 22nd the voting has begun.

Make a quick account at www.whencloverfieldhit.com and vote for my video here:

http://www.whencloverfieldhit.com/video/view/245

The rules say that you can vote on it once a day every day starting today until May 13th. So help a brotha out and vote

---------------------

For some substance here is an account of what I had to deal with to make this film:

First I had loads of time constraints. I had just heard of the contest on the 18th or so which pretty much cut out any idea's I could have had for special effects (While I acknowledge this film not to be my best work, I do have the experience and knowledge to output something better).

I also decided to not use any real actors (Which helped me out in the end considering the rules state NOT to use real actors or at least any affiliated with SAG).

The films criteria was to be no more than 100mb and no more than 5min long. You had to display what YOU would be doing during the day when the Cloverfield disaster took place, this also made me decide not to come up with any story what-so-ever outside of what a regular night out would be for me.

I did write down a basic outline and I tried to follow that the best I could.

So the stage was set. Story was a night out with friends, the actors in the film are my friends and to keep it authentic, instead of filming with my Panasonic AG-DVX-100B, I instead opted to film with my Archos Helmet cam.

This was sort of a one-shot deal as I only had Saturday night to film what I needed, and while most of the people I know are affiliated with film in some way or another I wanted things to be as authentic as possible, so (With the exception of the ending) nothing was scripted or planned, whenever I felt everyone was comfortable with whatever situation we were in or even forgot the camera was there was when I pressed the quick button on the cord and started recording a scene.

I had a lot of fun doing this and theres actually a lot of good footage that I could have used to make this a better picture, however when you go for being as authentic as possible you can sometimes break the rules.

Some of the pittfalls:

The rules state that there can be absolutely no music at all besides the music supplied on the main website. A big problem with this is while the night's plan was to go to a bar, the reason we went to this bar was to see a friends band. So any scenes I got in the bar, couldn't be used.

Also the rules state that there can be absolutely no recognizable brands or logos shown (Unless it was from Cloverfield). This was something I should have thought about from the get-go because I normally think about it in my own productions. But normally when going the guerlla route, you tend to not pay attention to things like that.

So something hilarious happened. As you can see in the video my friend is wearing a Dominos Pizza jacket (No he doesn't work there, or ever worked there). So I had to cut around his arm that had the Dominos Pizza logo on it. Also filming the thing entirely in NYC it's very hard to avoid logos and signs and such which made me had to cut around that as well (To the point of dropping entire scenes, one of my favorites in a Starbucks).

Slap on that I had to avoid profanitys (Although I beleive theres one in the end that they let slip by, I cut around a lot of the other ones- People generally curse in conversation) and it added to some weird jumpiness at parts.

Editing things down to 5mins from around 40min of total footage as story and not a trailer is kinda hard to, although I have some experience with this.

Any other questions or whatever concerning filmmaking, I don't mind talking about.

In any case, help me out and vote :P
Replies

Apr 22, 2008MiTcH1337

Okay I voted.

Now you owe me a favor.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=35Mrow3oORc
Rate/Comment it? ^

Apr 22, 2008Wesker

Haha, Thanks for the vote! Try to come back to the video every day and vote until the 13th :X, Btw I rated/commented your video.

Apr 22, 2008MiTcH1337

Sure.

Thanks for the comment =]

Apr 22, 2008Franticfred

i voted for you

Apr 22, 2008blakeashake

i voted

Apr 22, 2008sam

Im about to vote, just wanna say that was a damn good entry! Its too bad you couldnt use any of the bar scenes. Well, good luck!

Apr 22, 2008SapAuthor

i voted

Apr 23, 2008Wesker

Thanks guys!

Same: Thanks, It really was a shame I couldn't use any bar scenes but I was hoping showing outside of the bar with some people clearly acting uhmm "Happy", at least showed that we were somewhere.

Only good conclusion you can come to is that maybe I wasn't allowed to film in a bar (which wasn't the case, but depending on where you go can be likely).

Apr 23, 2008blakeashake

I tried to go back and vote again today but it said that my account doesn't exist. anyone else have this problem?

Apr 23, 2008sam

I actually had that problem with internet explorer earlier today at school, but when i came later it worked.

Apr 23, 2008blakeashake

Ehh im using mozilla firefox. But i'll just keep trying.

Apr 24, 2008Wesker

Thanks again for the support guys! I've slipped back to the top of Page 4 which is a big bummer, if you could get anyone else to vote please ask :X (No shame lol)

The biggest thing to this voting process is consistency.

Apr 28, 2008iwantsoapshoes

wtf is the cloverfield disaster

Apr 28, 2008Hattmac02

hey if any of you wanted to know or if you had the dvd i found the easter eggs on it
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