Yeah! I won the first Brandfighters battle with the videocompetition for GoFast.

I wrote a little script, and together with my friend Martin I shot the whole thing in one day. The following two and something weeks I worked fulltime on it, compositing it into shape.

Download HD version:
090500 GoFast08.720p25.8M256.mp4.mp4 (176 MB)

Watch on YouTube:

(Or go there for HD version)


On May 28th the battle was over, and I won the 1st price in creativity and 4th price in virality!

The 4th virality price was a Canon Legria FS 200 videocamera. The competition hosters advertised this as a €400 camera though it was in the shops for €240. I sold it for €200. Admittedly, I was convinced that I would win the 1st price (€5000), which is why I spend so much time on it in the first place. I entered after seeing the submissions so far. But this competition was more about viral 'marketing' than anything else so three movies that were probably finished in a day beat me fair and square. The Brandfighters hosters changed their ranking policy after this match though.



Reveiling the shots

Let me show you just a few pics for your entertainment. You've probably noticed this yourself, but:

Air-drinking was accomplished with a little gravity. I made some funny shots but didn't fit the movie at all. I just used the most normal one.



The fake mobile phone screen was another impulse decision. I was gonna really send a text, but it would suck for retakes. Besides, the small letters on the real screen kinda sucked.




For added chicken reality I grabbed a real one. No chickens were harmed!




And finally, to illustrate how my expensive wire studio looks, you might have noticed some of the wiring I forgot to paint out.





Critiques

I've rushed a few things, some bad. Most notably the lame title at the start. This was because of a wakeup call when the real deadline appeared to be 4 days before the one in my planning. My final pre-deadline upload timing was really a matter of minutes!

Here's some other concessions I had to do to finish in time:

• The first guy train shot is pretty terrible. It is actually a retouched version of my draft shot. Because the different shots used in the composition are a bad match I'd need at least another day to make it look somewhat better.
  
• Some shots have draftlike motion blur settings. You can actually see the iterations per frame setting is low. But I couldn't rerender them, as even though the comps look quite simple, they took (and I don't get it either) 10 minutes per second to render!!
  
• Particles... the splash is poor and the chicken feathers fly like there's a small breeze in stead of fullblown lift-off.
  
• I didn't master the sound track at all. Sound goes second-last in my workflow, so I just quickly grabbed some foley from my schools library.
  
• Couldn't find a sound that fits with the burning.
  
• Multilayer smoke and roto'ing burned places on the target would look a lot better, but that would quickly take days.
  
• Just some noise was layered on top in stead of video grain. About an hour before the deadline, the videograin render would still take 1h20 to render. So I cancelled and quickly replaced it with some noise, and the render took 15 mintes.
  
• Shots aren't color-matched in post.
  
• Not a concession but a side-note: The last TWO shots are purposely not passed through CC/grain to emphasize the reality check of falling into the water. Even though only the last one represents a subjective view, the CC changed earlier sort of like a L-edit but with CC in stead of sound. Only now that a few people mentioned it I think they feel like it's a mistake.
  

More timelack

I wanted to do a big make over after the competition, but my ongoing mission to graduate soon holds a tight grip over my time. I will probably introduce some minor changes if (if) I submit this to the Beeldbuis Filmfestival.

It is true what they say you know. You never finish a project; you abandon a project.


Software used

• After Effects CS3
  
• Première Pro
  
• Photoshop
  
• VirtualDub
  
• AviSynth
  
• DGIndex (Circumvent AE's MediaCore)
  
• FFMpeg (for MP2 proxies)
  
• x264 (for final MP4, way better than AE's MainConcept)