While Angel is busy working on our video project, I thought I would sneak in a blog entry while I have the chance.

More than a few years ago I met Angel while working for a computer accessory manufacture. Angel was brought in to help us create a corporate video. As I showed Angel around the company and how much material we needed to cover, Angel seemed to be enthused to get the job done, that is, until she saw the equipment she would have to use to produce the video.

The company we were working for was not huge by Microsoft’s standard, but it was no mom and popshop either. This company had money! It was selling over 500 million dollars a year with over two thousands different products in retail stores such as Best Buy, Circuit City, and Wal-Mart. I’m sure when Angel learned all this she was expecting to work with a professional camera and full video editing bay. I’ll never forget the look on Angel’s face when I gave her a small $150 hi8 video camera and told her that our editing software was a bootleg program running on an old computer. If I remember correctly, I think Angel actually laughed. I didn’t blame her; after all, she had been on real motion picture movie set.

I’m not sure why Angel stuck around and finished the corporate video. As we worked together, I think we had a conversation about how we had nowhere to go but up with the company. We figured that if we could make a decent video with what we had then maybe, we could eventually, beg, borrow and steal better equipment. Sure enough, after a year we had worked up to a six thousand video camera and a thirty thousand video editing system. We finally had what we needed to produce quality videos but, as it turned out we didn’t have everything we wanted. After producing numerous corporate videos we found out that we wanted the FREEDOM to be more creative. Corporate work paid the bills but it didn’t fulfill our creative urges.

So here we are back at square one. As we start our project with Stevie, Angel and I laughed at ourselves, recognizing that we have no right to produce a short film with the lack of equipment we have in our possession. In fact, it’s down right insane to attempt a film with little to no equipment, no budget and no way of selling the video after it’s completed. So why do it? That’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves since we committed to the project. When I know the answer I’ll let you know. However, I do know for a fact that we will not let a lack of resources keep us from doing what we have to do. After all, we did it once we can do it again. We’ll start with almost nothing and somehow we’ll beg, borrow and steal (well, maybe we won’t steal) to get this project done. I’m sure we’ll grow from this experience, besides we have nowhere to go but up!

As we progress with this project with Stevie, I ‘ll keep you updated in this blog on how we manage to script, film and postproduce the video. Stay tuned…

Thanks
Paul M