I recently dug up an old "movie" I made in high school with some friends. It was the final project for a film studies class in which we spent most of our time goofing around, until it became apparent that yes, the final project was in fact required, so we had better get started. 

Back in 2000/2001 iMovie didn’t exist yet, so the class videos were all made on a monstrosity called Avid Cinema, an "easy to use" NLE that… well… turned even the best video into grainy, unwatchable crap.  Pretty much the only thing it could do well was slap a CD track onto a set of video clips, resulting in a "music video montage" of sorts.  So, every film studies project ultimately turned into a series of blurry shots of teenagers looking pensive, contemplating the deeper meaning of it all in the way only teenagers can, all set to the latest pop music soundtracks. 

More than anything, I think this was the fault of the technology that was available to us at the time.  Basically, all you could do with Avid Cinema and a 1980′s VHS camcorder (featuring omni-directional nubbin-style microphone!) was make washed-out music videos.  So it goes.

In those years, however, I was spending most of my afternoons at the local cable access station, and was therefore able to scrounge up some nicer toys to play with (Thanks Tom!).  So, off we set to create our epic with a JVC GY-DV500, and a fancy directional boom mic (which naturally makes its way into at least one shot in the final edit).

All we needed now was a script.

We wrote one… eventually.  Actually, most of it was written in the van on the way to the cabin, where the bulk of the movie was shot.  Heh.

After it was shot, there was no way I was going anywhere near Avid Cinema, so I hijacked a B&W Mac G3 from the computer lab and spent days working with what I think was the 1.0 or 1.1 version of Final Cut. (Later upgraded to 1.2.5 to fix a horrible audio sync problem.  Oh how I still remember the joy that upgrade brought.) 

Editing can definitely put you "in the zone."  Once I ended up skipping the last half of classes that day to go down and edit in the lab, and working straight through until about 1:30 in the morning.  I think they forgot I was there.  By the way, nothing is more spooky than walking through the hallways of your high school in the middle of the night, expecting at any moment for the night janitor to pop out of a locker and decapitate you with his mop.  Ugh.  Editing does things to the mind.

In any case, that was my long winded way of getting to this point:  I uploaded it to Google Video for posterity’s sake a few days ago, and I figured I might as well share it. So please enjoy our film: "unrendered*"

*The title comes from the blue "unrendered" screen which was all Final Cut seemed to want to display on the preview monitors.