Kevin McGowan's Blog

One of may favorite events is the Brattle Theatre’s annual Trailer Treats night.  It’s a night all about the best part of going to the movies, the trailers.  The highlight of the night is the Trailer Smackdown, a contest to see who can make the best fake trailer.

The rules were announced about a month before the Smackdown.  The event’s organizers give you a title as well as a list of actions, characters, genres and locations to pick from.  This year we had to make a 2 minute long trailer for a non-existent movie called ”Ten”.

My group’s trailer for “Ten”:

This was our third year entering the Smackdown.  Since last year’s contest, we have been toying with the idea of doing a musical.  After learning this year’s title, we thought that the story of the man on the ten dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, would make a great musical.

Recording the vocals for “10″

Writing the script and the songs took about two and a half weekes.  Then we only had a week and a half to record the songs, shoot the video and edit it all together.  It’s was important to record the music first, so that the actors could lip synch to the music.  The vocals were all original but the music was Apple Garageband loops (had to take a shortcut).

We were lucky to have so many musically talented people on our team.  Our Alexander Hamilton, Rev, sings and plays bass in several bands including the Evil Streaks and Flowers in the Basement.  And yes “Rev” is the name he goes by.  The vocals for Aaron Burr were not recorded by Evan, who plays Aaron in the trailer, but by Matt Williams (who also plays Ben Franklin).   Matt’s an amazing singer who is the musical director of the Mass Whole Notes.

Evan’s parents sat on lawn chairs and watch us film this scene. True Story.

We lucked out by shooting the weekend before the fourth of July as that’s the prefect time to find cheap tri-corner hats and powdered wigs.  Although, after three days of shooting in 90 degree heat, the cheap wigs didn’t look or smell too good.

Walking around dressed like this is a great way to meet interesting people.

On our first day of shooting we got did our two “large” group musical numbers.  Everyone was excited for the shoot and didn’t mind dressing funny and dancing in public.  Despite the heat, it was a blast to shoot.  The next two days of shooting focused on Evan and Rev (our Aaron and Alex).  I was very impressed with both of their performances and I think they both have some serious acting chops.

This scene was very fun to shoot.

Our trailer was shot on a 5DmrkII.  I cut it in Final Cut Pro X.  I went with FCPX because of it’s audio synch feature made it easy to synch the pre-recorded music to the video.  However, after tring FCPX for almost a year, I’m really not happy with it.  Next time I try a project like this, I’m going to use Plural Eyes and either Avid or Premiere.  (What’s wrong with FCPX is a topic for another day).  I used Magic Bullet Looks for help with color grading.  I also pushed most of the close-up shoots through Magic Bullet’s beautifying filter – Cosmo.

The Smackdown

Thanks to the hard work of a lot of talented people, we managed to finish on time.  On July 12 our trailer was screened with the other sixteen trailers that were submitted to the Smackdown.    All the trailers were amazing.  What’s so fun about this contest is that everyone goes all out.  Links to some of my favorites are at the end of this post.  In the end, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, all that matters is that you have fun making your trailer.  And we had a lot of fun making our trailer.

… however, we did also win.

Can’t believe it.

I’m in shock that we won, as there where so many other good trailers.  However, I’m also very proud of the hard work everyone on my team put into this trailer.  I can’t wait for next year to do it all again.

A few of my favorite trailers by other teams:

I was happy to see Collective Fedora win second place for this true story about the Beatles:

This really sums up the nature of making trailers for fake movies and won third place.

Funny film about how tough it is to be a parent…

Creepy pigs…

The Final Cut Pro User Group gathering, SuperMeet, was the most exciting event at NAB this year.  FCPUG always has a big event during NAB, featuring presentations from profesional editors, software companies, and a huge raffle.  This year, Apple bumped all the planned speakers (such as Kevin Smith) to show a sneak of the new Final Cut Pro.  As someone who retinely watches live blogging of Apple press conferences, it was it pleased the Apple nerd in me to no end to be in the room the first time the new Final Cut was demoed to the public.

The event began with a powerpoint keynote presentation about Final Cut and then had a demo both by Apple engineers who worked on designing the software.  While there is still a lot of unanswered questions about the new software, there’s plenty to be excited about.

The most exciting things we learned about FCPX:

1. Magnetic Clips/Non-destructive Editing
   Anyone who has spent time using the current Final Cut (or any NLE, or even flatbed editing for that matter) knows that you need to put a great deal of effort and care in making sure that any edit you make don’t affect clips in the “future”.   You may just want to make one shot a second shorter, but suddenly every shot after that shot is now a second off.  In the current FCP, only synched audio clips will move, but any other tracks that you have manually synched to a clip (click sound effects, music, titles) will be off. 

   Enter FCPX where you can “magnetically” link multiple audio and video clips together.  Once you link the clips, it’s imposible for you to unlink them by making changes elsewhere on your timeline.  If you want to cut your audio form one shot overlap the next shot, don’t worry about a clip collision, simply drag the audio over and the other track will automatically get out of the way.  It’s something I never exactly thought of as a problem with Final Cut, but once I  saw it in action I was wowed by how powerful and simple it was.  Why hasn’t it aways been this way.

2. Tons of Nesting
   True, there is nesting in the current FCP, but now nesting has become a lot more useful.  If you bring in a video with synched audio that are linked together in a “nested” shot.  On your timeline they are one item (unlike the three items they would be in the current FCP).  You can also nest together groups of shots (or entire scenes).  That way, if you had a feature film, you could have could have only one item on your timeline for each scene.  At any time you could than clip into that scene to make edits, all the while care free from the worries that your edits will affect clips later in the timeline.  Trust me, this is very very cool.
3. Native Editing
   Instead of having to convert everything to ProRes, in FCPX you can edit H.264 and AVCHD natively (as a AVCHD shooter, I cheered when they announced this part).
4. Price
   It’s $300.  Everyone can afford that.  It makes the $500 price tag for the Adobe half-update look even more ridiculous.

I conclusion, FCPX is going to be a must have program.  Also, I didn’t win anything in the raffle.