The Winigs - Living The Dream

Our very own Nikki and her brother Scott(the Winig Siblings) are living the dream. Scott had a dream of directing and Nikki had a dream of editing and now...their worlds have merged. The Winigs have become a directorial/editorial Juggernaut. Bullet For My Valentine needed a video for their track, "All These Things I Hate." Scott got tabbed to direct and Nikki got the call to cut. The collaboration is a tour-de-force of green transferred glam-goth pop performance intercut with a simple yet stirring story of love, motel sex, fate and vehicular tragedy.
Nice job Wonder Winigs.
Go here to see the magic.
Go here to see more of Scott's directing magic.

Brooksy Has A Birthday - We All Go Crazy!

Last Friday night marked the first show by the Young Offenders - a band with Jason on vocals and guitar, Pete the Ox on drums, Doogie on bass and our very own Tim Brooks on guitar and vocals. It also happened to be Brooks birthday. We all went out as a show of support and typically, things got a shade out of hand.
Regarding the evite to the show Brian wrote, "young offenders....hmmm, so you really still think you're young and offensive....well, at least i better be offended on friday."
To which Tim responded, "most folks would be offended by a bunch of bald old fuckers playing rock. You? a different story, I'll see if I can sacrifice a small goat or something...."
On to Friday night. It was a solid show, especially for being their first one. Dancing Doogie on bass centered the stage doing a half Irish gig with some moshing on the side. Scrawny Brooks flexed his pumped bi-ceps while playing off his mick-mate. Jason and Pete anchored the other half of the band like cool older brothers. Connor absconded with Brian's camera shooting the random high, low, and off angle shots. As Brooks later said, "Nobody wants to do that.
Somebody has got to be that guy."(Read obnoxious asshole with the camera.)




Then the wig got passed around.
Brooks, thanks for having a birthday. We had a blast.

Sleep? I don’t need no stinking sleep!

Hello all and welcome to the first post from your friends at Filmcore Santa Monica. I’d like to tell you all about a little short film competition I took part in at the end of October. It’s called The National Film Challenge and it takes place over a weekend. I know you are thinking hmmm make a short film over a weekend – no problem, but there are rules! Before the weekend you can get your team together, find a location, get actors, and do basic planning. I had a great team to work with, our director was Chuck Bennett from Big Lawn Films, Andrew Denyer also from Big Lawn produced, Cooper Olsen was our writer and Teddy Brown our art director, both from FCB, and yours truly Tiffany Burchard as the editor.

So let me tell you how the competition works. On Friday evening at 7pm we were e-mailed four key components to be used in our film. Because this is a national competition these elements are generated randomly so that no team has an advantage over another.

The key components are as follows:
1. Genre (ours was Sci-Fi)
2. Character (Chris Whiffle, DJ)
3. Prop (boat)
4. Line of dialogue (“Where on earth is your faith?”)

Once this information is sent you have until Monday evening before the last drop off at FedEx to write, shoot, edit, and finish the short film! In addition, if you use any music in your film you must have the rights to it.

Now the fun begins! Well I have to say our team worked really well together and we had an amazing time. We spent Friday evening brainstorming and coming up with our story. Cooper wrote some really great dialogue, I couldn’t believe how fast he came up with it! Phase one was complete – whew! Saturday was our shoot, which for the most part went pretty smooth. Towards the end of the day we were scrambling to get all our shots before the sun went down. Unfortunately we weren’t fast enough and had to use lights to shoot a couple of scenes, and one scene was just too dark to use. What can I say those little bumps are to be expected with such a quick project. After a long day shooting I ran back to Filmcore to digitize all the footage and get started. Fatigue was starting to set in at this point. I had many technical problems which I think all turned out to be operator error due to my lack of sleep, so I thought it would be best to get some sleep and start fresh in the morning. Sunday morning - time for me to get to work. I’m still pretty tired, but my brain is functioning better today. The film came together pretty quickly and the team met up to see the cut. At this point everyone seemed pretty happy with our film and it was now all about the finishing details. A couple composer friends of mine from Confidence Head let us use a couple of their tracks for the film – thanks Mike & Tobey! At this point we decided to leave the polishing for Monday. Chuck & Andrew were able to pull a few strings and get a tape to tape and a little mix. Now it was up to me to assemble the pieces and make the DVD and send it off to the judges. No problem. Well the Avid didn’t seem to have the same positive attitude as I did. After a few attempts at making a DVD we decided to go with Plan B and make a miniDV dub. The clock was ticking down. The dub was finally made. Andrew ran out the door and to FedEx with 5 minutes to spare! We made it! Now it was up to the first round of judges to pick the top 15 films out of the 139 that made the deadline.

Well I’m happy to announce that our film was chosen as one of the top 15. Now it is in the second phase of judging where they choose the top film in several categories – much like the Oscars (he he). All 15 films are online for viewing and you can vote on your favorite film (LEMONS) for the Audience Award Winner.

http://filmchallenge.org/2005films/vote.php

So please take a few minutes to watch LEMONS and vote for us! Oh and if you enjoy it pass the word along to your friends and ask them to vote for LEMONS too!

Did I mention the name of our film is LEMONS?