My new project: Tact, a simple chat app.

Star City — our quick short film production

August 10, 2007

“Star City” was a film production that we entered in Assembly 07 short film competition. It did qualify to the finals and was shown on the bigscreen, which is great, and then it got the last place, which could have been better, of course :) but… we’re still happy about it, as it got shown to thousands of people and it’s not a shame to lose to such great competition (other entries were really really good and much better than Star City, so be sure to watch them too).

Here’s a low-quality YouTube version. You can download a higher-quality version here (click on one of the “Download from” links).

So yeah… when I said that I’d work on some private projects this summer, then this was one of those projects. I did the sound in the movie. Listen below or Download the MP3..

We wanted to do an electro musicvideo type of thing (I listened a lot to Music Instructor’s “Supersonic” when putting down the initial beats). It was a great production experience, we mostly did it on the net using a lot of Skype chat and FTP and met only a few times. And of course, as usual, we ran almost out of time and had to do the final edits right there at the partyplace :) as seen on the photo below…

So yeah… the film was buggy as hell as you can see in the video, with, er, objects appearing and disappearing at random places :D and some sync issues and such, all caused by a lengthy rendering process. The other reason why it scored low was certainly sound in Assembly big hall. It sounded like total crap. And I thought it was only my fault, because I committed the mortal sin of all musicians when mixing the music: I did it with headphones, whereas everyone knows a proper way to do it would be with proper monitors (speakers). And so the mastering is shit, I still need to learn that after years… sigh…

But now later in the mailinglist discussions, it seems that everyone agrees that the sound system in the big hall was just shit for everyone, which further contributes to the shitness of the video sound, and they’re going to build it differently next year. So all in all, the soundtrack of the movie sounded less than ideal and it was a bit boring for people to watch.

So… even though we didn’t score very highly with this (but still got 430 points – thanks to everyone who voted for us! :) ), we all liked making it and will probably try again with something some year. Maybe. Who knows.