Paul Romein

Wow, talk about the pressure being on… with the deadline coming in real close for Century House, I worked like crazy today and edited a fair bit… probably the most progress in a single day.

The red addition is what I accomplished today.  You’ll notice progress sped up as time went on, which we knew would happen because we’d get more familiar with the masses of media and wouldn’t take nearly as long to find what we needed.  Hopefully it’ll be a wrap at 90% tomorrow…. then we only have re-edits and touchups to do over early next week.

Ahoy Mr. Blogger world, It’s been a small while, but I have vaild excuses!  Well, first of all, Christine is back in town, and I’ve been chatting on the phone with Nate a bunch so there aren’t too many people who are out of the loop! Anyways, I’ve been wrapping my mind around the Century House 50th Anniversary DVD project for the past several weeks, and we are “near” completion.  We’ve been keeping track of our progress and I’ve put it into a nice little chart here for everyone:

As you can see, we’re getting close… although it’s a little off because I’ve rigged it so that at 90% we are completely done the first edit, and the last 10% will be re-edits and such based on feedback from the DVD committee.  Did you realize that 80% of the word audio is made up of vowels?  I noticed that yesterday… But these past few days have been difficult because Spencer’s allergy to work has finally caught up with him and he’s been sick since the weekend.  He came in yesterday, but I also happened to have picked up a sore throat the night before – and surprisingly not due to him because he hadn’t even been in?!?!  But we had a rough day editing yesterday and he hasn’t been seen today.  I really should be spending this short-handed time working, but instead I’m blogging…hrm.  The “World Premiere” of the documentary is being shown at Century House on July 4th, so we have to be done 90% in the next couple days.
Another big thing that has drawn a lot of my time recently has been programming my own personal web photo album.  It took roughly40-50 hours of work over a few nights where I severly was lacking on sleep… but I have the first version of it released and up and running.

My favourite part is only accessible within my house, where I browse to my linux box’s local web server and with the click of one button I can resize and upload photos from my computer and they are immediately accessible on paulromein.ca

http://www.paulromein.ca/album/

Check it out at the link above.

We got a phone call from ICBC this morning confirming that it will be a write-off because it’d be at least $4500 just to fix the rear door assembly.

Today’s morning and afternoon were spent digging into the Century House project, mostly gathering the 27.5 hours of video we’ve recorded for it, as well as locating the 16mm film from the 1950’s, and scanning photos from ancient photo albums.  We’ve drawn up some sketches on a white board of how we’re going to make it flow, but we’re mostly using a whole whack of side documents for the meat. It begins….

In the evening, I re-opened the edit from last night which I was up until 3:30am editing.  I’ve titled the film “After The Car Crashed”.  Spencer scored it this afternoon, and I touched up the audio track and foleyed the intro tire screeches and I created the car crash medley.  Lastly, I got Mark Condon, Brian, and Petrin outside in the backyard to hit a cantaloupe with a baseball bat in mid-air while I recorded it and plopped that in as the sound for the hit later on in the film.  It was quite weird to be holding the mic, and not be able to move as you get splattered with cantaloupe.  I wasn’t really expecting such an explosion in my face.

I present to you all, After The Car Crashed.

I worked most of the day, and was gratiously visited by Brittany for a lunch break where she brought buns and we cooked up some burgers.  The only problem was that I couldn’t spend much of my lunch break with just her like I wanted because literally everybody came out of the house to hang out around the barbeque.  Oh well.

I got started on the prep ground work for the Century House project that will be my entire focus for the next few weeks.  Basically we’re making roughly a 45 minute  documentary for their 50th Anniversary.  It’s gonna be awesome!

In the evening, I’ve been working on an edit for a short last minute thing I shot last night.  I came up with the idea around 2pm, and called a bunch of people.  The only people available were Janet, Mike, Spencer, and Dan to act, myself and Corinne on camera, and Sam even came out to do up some good looking scratches on their faces and such!  The whole idea was to do a short film around my wrecked car as a set while we still had it.  It got towed away today and is probably a write off so we’ll never see it again.  The edit is coming along, just stay tuned for me to post it.

Later on, Jason, Brian, and I went down to Silver City to catch the 9:30 showing of Iron Man, but when we got in there a few minutes into the previews it was so full that we counted about four free seats in the entire theatre (obviously not next to eachother either), so we opted to postpone to the 10:10 showing.  Stupid two hours later put it into a late night, but I still came home and did some editing…. that car wreck film is really attractive to edit!