Wordsmoker

Remember the excitement of the first ever micro-fiction contest, back in maybe 2009 or something, I can’t be bothered to look up the date? If you weren’t around back then, well – let me tell you this, pard’ner – you sure as hell missed yourself one heck of a party, you sure did, there was hooch and not the cheap kind and we all sat around on hay bails as high as twelve tractors, in the darkness, just composing the shit outa experiments with present tense and loose metaphor. What a damned great time that was, I tell ya. We smoked til the heavens themselves opened, ruining all our MacBooks, and we made sweet, damp love in a camper van surrounded by badgers.

Ladies and gentlemen – it’s time to re-live those glory days.

As you may or may not know, I’m starting a not-for-profit organisation over here called the “Milim Academy Of Performing Arts“. Seeing how the not-for-profit will hopefully be keeping the servers running by the end of the year, I’d like the Wordsmoker Community to introduce their creative selves to the Academy in the form of some short film-making. A caveat!

You work will be seen by a lot more people than normal. People in other countries, like Scotland and the rest of the UK. Now, how you want to treat this is up to you, as I don’t want to pre-censor anyone’s work. I just want it to be known that you’ll be seen.

With a new competition, there must come new rules. And these are the rules.

Keep your final footage under 14 minutes so I can upload it to YouTube without paying them money. There’s no rules about how short your short-film has to be, but at least do a minute of something so it merits me spending 20 minutes giving it a title with Premiere Pro. Don’t do the opening titles yourself, as I want them to have the same look and feel as the rest of the entries. Attach your nom de plume or real name to the video file. If you want to include your own metadata (how you describe the video yourself) include that in an email.

Getting your short-film to Wordsmoker

If your phone or camera thing shoots in HD, all the better as I want them to look as good as possible. 14 minutes of HD footage means about 700MB in Apple’s .mov format, so it’s not like you can mail that to the usual address. At the moment I’m into DropBox, as it’s a good, free way of sharing large files with each other. Again – it’s free, and it’ll give you 2GB of space to upload your video to. The setup takes 2 minutes, all you need to give them is a username, password and email address. It works on Mac’s, Windows etc.. Remember – you need to upload your video file first, so don’t do it via your Phone unless you’ve got a good data plan.

I’m currently thinking that this is the best way to get the actual files to Wordsmoker. If you’ve got a better way to do it, please let me know in the comments.

Enough with the technical details. On with the show.

This is the first competition and I wanted a nice theme to kick it off with, so I’m choosing “Kubrick”. It can be something shot with his dispassionate eye. Something revolving around naughty computers. Natural use of light? Shooting your pets to “Also Sprach Zarathustra”?  I dunno, but link it into something to do with him, or you’ll fail.

Whatever it is, make your movie evocative of “Kubrick” somehow. If you’re being oblique, write a short note on how it relates to Kubrick, just so us morans get it, right?

Closing date for the competition will be Pacific midnight, Thursday, May 31st, 2012.

If you want to ask questions, leave them in the comments as someone else might have the same one.

GET FILM-MAKING, HOT BITCHES.

Love you all,

VirusWithShoes