Nothing like a crash course to get you educated on something, eh? I've been doing some video editing for a while now but mostly simple amateurish stuff. I've got Final Cut Pro but I've been mostly cranking on iMovie (and pushing it hard) as I didn't feel comfortable in FCP yet. That changed this past weekend...

A few local organizations organized a "5x24" movie event -- make a 5 minute or less movie in 24 hours. The deal was this: call a number on Friday night between 6 and 8pm to hear a recorded sentence ("And now, God knows, anything goes") and then make a movie based on it in 24 hours. Everybody shows up at 8pm Saturday night and shows off their creations. Crazy fun stuff and great practice at making movies and editing!
I roped my friends Bill, Michelle and Jack into action and we brainstormed and talked and ate and procrastinated and thought and... we decided to go the experimental and avant-garde route. In fact, our hypothesis of the situation was perhaps the people were annoying art snobs who only claim to like movies that they don't understand and that we could make a movie of such utter random crap that they would proclaim it to be cutting-edge and monumental. We started filming about midnight in Bill's basement and captured about 30 minutes of random crazy textural distorted footage each.
It ended up being mostly just Bill and myself as the others had prior plans for Saturday and somehow I ended up doing all the video editing, which was cool 'cuz I had just really dug in to FCP in the prior days and felt ready to flex my new knowledge muscles. I edited from 1pm to about 5:30pm Saturday. Then we waited apprehensively while the computer rendered the video for the next hour and half! I was afraid we wouldn't make it in time. We dumped the finished 3:45 minute piece to tape and headed out.
I was so super nervous upon arrival that I thought I might actually be sick -- my stomach was all fluttery and my leg wouldn't stop bouncing and I had that chill sweat you get before public speaking. I drank more water. Once the first piece started showing, I calmed down at bit as it was obvious that our piece was going to be better... a few funny films seemed to relax everybody... Finally ours came up. Yipe! Super nervous again. I was scanning the crowd, trying to figure out reactions to our piece, but was also trying to watch it on the big screen. I think people were enthralled the whole way through, but ultimately confused by the content and it didn't help that the phrase we incorporated was obscured from normal perception. Still, we had done it and it looked awesome!
In the end, all the pieces were fun and interesting and inspiring just from the sheer creative level of doing something like this project. Our piece most definitely had the best production quality and looked the nicest, but I would say most attendees liked other movies over ours. That's OK. We only did it for fun anyway and we'll do it again in the future.