What are you doing Thursday night? You’re going to the first annual Pikes Peak Community College Film Festival, that’s what!

That’s right! The PPCC Film Club is hosting a film festival showing an exciting variety of short films created by talented PPCC students! I invite you to join us Thursday, April 24th at 5 PM to see a bunch of films created by students that are passionate about making films. Admission is free and there will be a ton of free prizes awarded throughout the night. The Film Festival should last until about 7:30.

Please join us on Thursday night at 5 PM to help make the first ever PPCC Film Festival a huge success. Are you a student at PPCC? Make sure to join the PPCC Film Club and help to continue the Film Festival for years to come. We can’t do this without your help. Learn more about the next meeting of the Film Club at the Film Festival!

Watch the trailer!

The PPCC Film Festival is held at the Pikes Peak Community College Centennial Campus ( 5675 S. Academy Blvd, Colorado Springs, CO ). I25 South, Academy Exit, bear right, first left. Park in Lot E and follow the signs to the Theatre. Don’t live in Colorado Springs? Take a plane! Drive! Walk! Get to the Film Festival!

I’m cutting together the footage for the short film our youth group is making. I love editing stuff. this is like my dream job. The first two movies I made were really rushed and for school so I didn’t do such a great job on them, but I just love sitting down and going through footage. Finding the awesome parts. Making it all flow. This is what I want to do forever.

Hopefully we’ll start getting some jobs and all I will have to do is edit. Shoot, edit, awesome. If I could do this for the rest of my life I would be happy.

While I was running through the footage I came across a scene of epic fail. Everybody messed up their lines or said them wrong, but we just kept rolling. It was awesome.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post a preview of the film to come by the end of this week. I should have all the footage cut together by tomorrow. Over the next couple of days I’ll be working on the keying. Then I’ll be doing the hard part: Making a fake lake and beach. Deadline to have it completed is May 16th at the latest. I’m putting my deadline at the 10th, but shooting for having it completed on the 3rd.

For quite some time I’ve wanted to make a short film with a war theme. I’m thinking about 15 minutes in length. I was originally thinking about World War 2, but far too many films are made about WW2 so I want to think about something different.

I’m looking for some input, to see if anybody has any suggestions as far as a time period to use. We have a bunch of Soviet / Russian gear that we could use, and I think we could pull off one of the many crazy things the Russians have done. I haven’t really looked too much into all the conflicts they’ve gotten into but I am sure there are plenty to pick from.

I had wanted to do this in the winter, but it looks like it will probably get filmed this summer instead. I’m also still thinking about if I want it to just follow like one person, a group of people, etc. The less people involved always makes it easier to shoot.

What I’m really looking to do with this war film is massive experimentation. I want to play around with fake explosions, squibs, special effects, smoke, guns, bombs, etc. I really want to be spending tons of time in After Effects and Lightwave making it look awesome.

We’re setting up a green screen to use for the Youth Group so I’m sure we can use that for anything as well. I’m really just hoping to get some great hands on experience figuring this stuff out and making a really awesome movie.

If anybody is interested in throwing some ideas my way, or even if you’d like to help make this (I’m in the Colorado Springs area) please let me know. Your help is more than welcome!

Yesterday I decided to build the $14 Steadycam that I have read so much about. It ended up coming out to just about $14 for parts (extra for the extra tools I bought, but no worries). I tried it out a little bit with our Sony FX1 and it really did help make smooth shots. Definitely check the steadycam out and build one yourself. They’re really easy to build and fix a lot of wobbly shots.

I’m building a teleprompter today. I don’t really have one design that I am building from, but sort of a collection of the designs I have seen (since I didn’t really like how any of them were made). I’m going to try out using regular glass. If that doesn’t work I may try tinting it or just order the special teleprompter glass. The teleprompter will help out quite a bit with the TOP 7 Action News.

I’m also playing around with Lightwave 3D. We’re going to be working on a fairly complicated video for our youth group and I think it will be easiest and look the best to do what I need in Lightwave. I’d also like to start learning Lightwave and 3D animation since we do have some projects that would work nicely if done with the program. 3D animation has always interested me as well and I’ve just never really sat down and started learning that. Hopefully I can make some good looking stuff and we can do Fetal Warriors in Lightwave.

I have decided to start a new website dedicated to discussing filmmaking. I have been to a lot of different discussion forums for filmmakers and nine of them really seemed right. I have created a new one for anybody that is interested in filmmaking to use. That includes kids just looking to make a one-time project, students in film school, industry professionals wishing to share their knowledge, and people who just want to know how films are made.

Please join my new forums and post any questions you may have or information you would like to share. It’s an easy to remember website: FilmBoards.org. I’m going to work on putting all the useful information I have bookmarked, printed, written down and created over the past year. So please make sure to check out my new filmmaker forums if you are at all interested in making films.

We just finished editing Cooking With Ninjas Episode 1 - Ninja Sandwich. Check it out on YouTube below and learn how to make the ultimate ninja sandwich !

You can download the higher quality MPG file here: 153 MB. You can watch at Revver if you are having problems with YouTube.

This was the second project for editing class at Pikes Peak Community College. We were originally going to do a Cuban Sandwich, but I didn’t feel like cooking the pork. The sandwich cost about $30 and fed 4 people. It was delicious. We actually lost a light halfway through filming, but still just had a lot of fun making this video. Thanks for watching it, and Digg it if you can! Thanks to Ninja Burger for the logo!