Music Video in a Day, the Acting Studio and Telefauna: notes on momentum building.

So the people at The Acting Studio of Montreal and Geordie Productions did a great thing last night, and the night before, helping me get really excited and increasingly confident about the feasibility and decided coolness of a 24hr Music Video Making Contest.

They are an incredibly supportive, wise and utterly unpretentious group of professionals, and beyond giving me great advice and connections, they are going to put together some teams to come out on the 5th and 6th, and take on the challenge of the 24hr Music Video along with the other brave makers. Woo!

This is great, because these folks run several professional and student 48hr Filmmaking Challenges throughout the year. Not only do they know how the madness goes, they are accustomed to working with the technology under time pressure and they have their own editing and dvd burning setups, which is what our version of the contest requires.

Last night I got to watch the three 20 minute movies that had just been made in 48hrs and, perched in the cozy drama of the Acting Studio- renovated by previous occupants with a gothic theme that seriously suits the theatrical- I was seriously impressed. The complexity of the narrative created in the editing; the flattering precision of the shots; and the general high quality of the lighting- were all beyond what I would have thought to expect from such a constrained act of creation. It really was exciting- and it reminded me of how tremendous the successes can be when you’re challenged creatively by limitations.

I’m glad to have people with this level of skills and experience on board, and I know a few other professionals are getting curious about the project, which is very exciting. I intend to keep encouraging folks with less experience to come out- I think that an individual working with footage they had, or the 30 second clips they can shoot with their digital photo camaera, or stock footage from online, and a simple video editor or even slideshow maker could make something really really interesting and cool. Something the likes of which Musique PLus and Much Music may have never seen. I’ll be posting links to tools and ideas as we go forward in order to continue to encourage this.

Last note to what has turned into a musing, rather then a particularly useful, blog post: After the screening last night I headed back up into the Mile End to a housewarming party for Adam and Tyler of Telefauna and their new roomate, my intern and Marketing teammate, Tessa. This is a particularly delicious instance of the loose ties in a network behaving powerfully, and coming together to create fortuitous housing arrangements. And the Telefauners themselves were getting really excited about the 24hr Music Video Making Contest. (We giggled and hugged for a bit. It was the end of the night, what can I say.) From their perspective, I think, it just a big free funfest- they’ll get to see fans, friends, strangers, pros, wrap their skills around the music they worked to make, and if all goes well they’ll get to meet some people who they really connect with, and hey, get a fricken video made. If all goes well, everybody wins, and with support from the likes of Chip and Dean from the Acting Studio, and professional Manager and Technician Merissa and Steve who introduced me to them, I have faith we can do this thang. So cheers to them!