Juggling Projects

These last couple of week I have been having a difficult time juggling multiple projects. Besides my schoolwork, I have been working on the edits for the DDAY paintball project, writing a script, working on pre-production for a short film and working on ideas for a promotional video for an art studio. It takes a good plan of action and a lot of dedication to stick to a tight schedule. I have prioritized these different projects and have been working on each of them accordingly. One nice thing about having multiple projects to work on at the same time, is the ability to switch from one project to another when I start to feel like I am getting burnt out on one of them. It is very important to keep a fresh mind and not over work myself and get tired of working nonstop on a single project. I have to really budget my time  with this many projects to work on at one time. I have to determine the importance of each project, what their deadlines are, and estimate how much time will be needed to complete each project.

Another thing that I have been working on is making these paintball videos unique. There are going to be seven of them and I want to make sure that each of them have their own distinct look and feel. I have been watching a lot of other paintball videos and military simulated videos for ideas and inspiration. I found one paintball video that was shot in a really cool way. You can check it out here:
https://vimeo.com/28817900

This video, Spitfire (Capture The Can) was shot on the Phantom Flex @ 1,000 frames per second. I really liked the idea of shooting at such a high speed and then speeding up and slowing down the footage. They made this short video so it would look like it was shot in one take and seemed very fluid. You can get a closer look at this video with their behind the scenes video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPY0b0mVZ5o

P.O.V. Edit

As you know, I have recently been in Oklahoma filming the world’s largest paintball event, DDAY Oklahoma. I am back in Florida now, in the beginning stages of editing the footage from the week-long paintball event. I have completed at short trailer for the event here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-4g75GGvP0&list=UUVxmnmN3iCSmQsOL10a76IQ&index=5&feature=plcp

This trailer is just a small taste of what is to come in following months of editing. I plan on creating a video for each day of paintballing. Right now I am working on a rough cut for the second day of play. I have decided to make each of these videos different. I want each of them to have their own flavor.

For the video of the second day, I have decided to make it look and feel like a first person shooter style video game. I am in the process of creating a H.U.D. with Adobe After Effects. I am using some of the design ideas from the games Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty. I want to make the viewer feel like they are a part of the game. I have mounted two cameras on myself, one on my head and the other on the front of my gun aimed back at my face. I plan on cutting between these two points of view to keep the flow of the edit interesting.

Some of the ideas that I want to incorporate in this video are to have friend or foe identification for other players. I am going to have blue and red symbols above people’s heads to help identify the teams. I am going to have ammo and air counters in the corner of the screen. After I add these layers to my edit I will work on color correction and find some music that will work well with this video.

Well I just finished filming at DDAY Oklahoma for their annual paintball event. I was there for seven days shooting the different events and even got a chance to play a little. Each day there was at least one mini scenario which usually lasted three to four hours, which I followed one of the divisions, the 82nd Airborne. Yesterday was the last day of the event and it was an all day game. I was up at 4:30am and the game didn't end until 5:00pm.

I decided to use three GoPros by attaching them to different player's guns and masks. I wanted to be able to present this paintball event from the player's point of view. This event had all sorts of things that most paintball events don't have, like tanks, Anti-tank weapons and smoke grenades. The people who manage DDAY wanted to make the event as realistic as possible.

Now I have a weeks worth of footage to go through and start on post production.

I have been involved with the sport of paintball longer than I have been interested in film. I started playing paintball at the age of 12 and haven't stopped since then. I started out filming our team's paintball tournaments and events that we attended. This passion has led me to creating paintball-related commercials and videos the paintball company, Qloader. 

One of my other videos can be seen as an advertizement at http://www.qloader.com/.  They make a unique and reliable loading system for most paintball guns. Next week I will be in Oklahoma filming and participating in America's largest paintball event. There were over 4,000 players who attended the week-long event. Here Is a re-cap of last year's event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppgMuGkqAo&list=UUVxmnmN3iCSmQsOL10a76IQ&index=5&feature=plcp
Not all of these paintball events are your normal tournament-style events, some of them are just for the experience.

I look forward to filming more commercials and promos for other paintball tournaments and events, and see where this passion will take me.