Coda Finished and Submitted to $100 Film Festival!

I finally have a finished film!

Mind you, the finished product of "Coda in G Minor" looks somewhat different than the rough excerpt of raw footage that I uploaded previously... but I'm pretty happy with the results. Now let's see if the film festival jury likes it.

Of course, there's that part of me that wants to keep working on it to see if there's some way to include the footage that I couldn't figure out how to include without interrupting the pacing and flow of the film. And I could probably keep tweaking it endlessly. But there comes a time when you have to decide that something is finished, let it go and move on to the next thing. And I think I'm willing to do this with "Coda." Finally. Maybe someday in the distant future, when I'm putting together a DVD of my early short films, I'll make a director's cut of "Coda"... increasing its running time from 2 minutes and 33 seconds to 3 whole minutes! Because by that point in my career I should hope that I could figure out how to work in that extra 30 seconds of footage. Then again, maybe by that point in my career I'll realize that there's no point in going back and tinkering with my very first short film that's less than three minutes long.

Now, technically, some people might argue that "Persephone" was my first finished film since it was screened at the Herland Film & Video Festival in 2007. But that was a workshop film screened in the workshop screening portion of the festival. And I have new footage that has already been shot and is ready to replace some of the workshop footage. There's no way that I'm sending out Persephone until that old footage is cut (preferably into a million little pieces so that no one ever has to see it ever again). So to sum up, I don't consider "Persephone" to be finished.

But back to "Coda"... if it gets selected for the $100 Film Festival, I'll need to make a film print. I have an interesting idea for that process that I picked up from Deco Dawson when he was here for his residency. Once I figure out how to make it work, I'll post the details here.

Rough Excerpt

I thought I'd post a very rough excerpt from "Coda in G Minor." Bear in mind that this is essentially raw footage strung together on my home computer using Windows Movie Maker. I have yet to take this into the CSIF to use their editing suite and choose my takes and adjust brightness and contrast... you get the idea. Oh and this footage is a very good example of why you should CHECK THE GATE when operating the camera. I'm hoping that the black line in the top left corner of the film is something I'll be able to get rid of when I do my actual edit. But enough disclaimers, here's a bit of "Coda":