Movie Time!

Grab some popcorn and a comfy seat everyone! I am very happy to announce that all three of the films I edited last year as part of my Senior Thesis (Prism, Doppelganer, and For Jacob) are now available online for viewing. I am very proud of the teams I had the pleasure of working with, and I hope you enjoy the collective fruits of our labor.

Dan Warner is a desaturator, tasked with sapping beauty from the world in a future where color is used as energy. (Directed by Jackson Miller)

-SEMIFINALIST in the 42nd ANNUAL STUDENT ACADEMY AWARDS
-63rd ANNUAL MPSE GOLDEN REEL NOMINEE VERNA FEILDS AWARD
-SAG 2015 LA SHORTS SHOWCASE
-AUDIENCE AWARD for BEST SHORT NARRATIVE at PRESCOTT FILM FESTIVAL 2015
-JURY AWARD for BEST COLLEGE SHORT FILM at CINEQUEST FILM FESTIVAL 2016
-JURY AWARD for BEST SCI FI at LAGUNA FILM FESTIVAL 2015
-OFFICIAL SELECTION at HOLLYSHORTS FILM FESTIVAL 2015
-OFFICIAL SELECTION at SKYLINE INDIE FILM FESTIVAL 2015
-OFFICIAL SELECTION at LONESTAR FILM FESTIVAL 2015
-COLLEGIATE SHOWCASE at NEWPORT FILM FESTIVAL 2016
-2015 DMA AWARD for BEST VFX (DODGE COLLEGE OF FILM AND MEDIA ARTS)
-Featured on Film Shortage 2016
-Featured on shortfil.ms 2016

A little girl’s relationship with her inattentive Father is changed for the better after an eerie and dangerous encounter at the neighborhood playground. (Directed by Carly Lambert)

-Los Angeles Cinefest's Official July Selection 2015
-29th Braunschweig International Film Festival Official Selection
-Official Selection Woman Up Independent Film Festival 2015
-Best Drama American Motion Picture Society Film Festival 2015
-Big House LA Entertainment Festival 2015

After his mother is arrested, a young man is forced to partake in a robbery in order to protect his little brother, Jacob. (Directed by MacMullin Freeman, password: jacob2015)

What's Up?

This past Saturday, February 27th, Prism was honored at the Motion Picture Sound Editors' Golden Reel Awards, being nominated for the Verna Fields Award in Sound Editing for Student Film Makers. I continue to be amazed by my team and the audience reception to this short. While the journey may have been rough to make this film a reality, the response has made it all worth it.

Production on AOI has begun to slow down a bit due to having to make larger story tweaks, as well as scheduling conflicts between myself and my sister. We hope to be back at it though soon enough, steadily working to piece together this fun project!

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Photo Cred: MPSE Website (www.mpse.org/golden-reel-awards)

And the Days Go By

Time for some updates! Prism received the Grand Jury award for Best SciFi at the Laguna Film Festival, and was also screened this past weekend at the Lone Star Film Festival. It's been six months since the film debuted, and it is still going strong in the shorts circuit.

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AOI Title (Art by Karina McBeth)

My sister and I have decided to combine episodes 1-3 of AOI for a stronger opening to the series. While this means that our premiere date will be have to be pushed back, it will allow us to thoroughly address the story issues that came up in Editorial. You can check out the introductory animation I cut for AOI here to get a feel for the style and tone of the webseries.

The Trek

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(Left to Right: Matthew Rebong, Jackson Miller, Richard Andrews, Amy McBeth)
Photo Cred: Jackson Miller

On Saturday, August 22nd, Prism premiered at the HollyShorts Film Festival in Hollywood. It was the first film festival I've ever gone to, and was quite exciting! Especially since I was going to support a film that I had been a part of. Alongside Prism, my team and I got to view a handful of other great shorts before we briefly talked about our film in front of the audience. We received a lot of compliments from viewers following the screening, with many intrigued that the short was entirely made by students.

Recently, I also found out that Doppelgänger is going to Germany to be part of the Braunschweig International Film Festival. I will be unable to attend, but my director will be going, and I look forward to hearing how it goes!

Festival Time

With the rush of thesis over comes the next step in the student film process -- the Festival circuit. Recently, I received word that Prism has begun to make its rounds, and has been accepted into the Screen Actors Guild Foundation LA Shorts Showcase, the Prescott Film Festival (going on now), and the HollyShorts Film Festival. The film has also caught the attention of the Academy and is now a Semifinalist for the Student Academy Awards. It's been quite surreal and exciting to see the response and watch the film take off. I am extremely proud of the team and am thrilled to see what these next months hold.

Grand Finale

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Link: Prism Facebook Page
Prism (2015) Copyright by Jackson Miller, David Reynolds, & Chris Purse

This past Thursday, May 14th, the third and final thesis film I edited this year premiered. It was the first VFX film I have ever cut, and I am pleased with how it eventually turned out. Our visual effects team did a great job at creating a believable world within the time they were given, and our audience seemed to appreciate their efforts. It was the film I spent the most time with this year, and served as the biggest learning curve in terms of communication and designing a workflow that accommodated both Editorial as well as the visual effects artists.

As this film enters the festival circuit, I am interested to see how it fares. I hope to stay in contact with the team I worked with, especially the director, as I feel given a story that we have more time to develop, we can create something even stronger. Working on this film was an experience I will truly never forget, and I am glad to have been given the opportunity to be a part of it.

Home Stretch

With only two months left to go, post production on the three films I'm cutting have ramped up as our screenings are just around the corner.

My latest film, Jacob, a quiet drama, has had the fastest turn around. Being that a week of work was going to be lost due to the university's Spring Break, I had to have a first cut completed within a few days of our shoot's wrap. As such, I chose to act as DIT on set so that I would be able to transcode, ingest, sync dailies, and begin cutting within AVID immediately. What definitely helped speed wise were the hot keys I had mapped out for myself on my keyboard. Thanks to working on Prism and Doppelganger prior to Jacob, I had a strong set of shortcuts to work with. I now know why my mentors at Pixar had such involved mapping on their keyboards! When you need to work fast, efficiency is key.

Over these past few weeks my director and I have been working hard at finessing the cut of Jacob. Following our initial screening, we received a handful of notes regarding issues of performance, lines to be cut, and questions of character motivation. When we sat down to create our new cut, my director and I immediately began to discuss which material we could remove. Before I knew it, we had cut out 3 minutes, and re-shaped the performances through the looping of lines and selecting of alternate takes. This past week, we presented the updated cut to our thesis classes, as well as one Graduate class. The response has been positive and I'm excited to see what these next few days have in store as we lock picture.

Yesterday, I was able to cut in the final pick ups for Doppelganger, as well as see a few of the rendered VFX shots for Prism. It's surreal to reflect on where each of these films began at the script stage, and how they've matured and evolved through production and post. Doppelganger is the first film out, premiering on April 17th, with Jacob on May 8th, and finally Prism on May 14th. Soon, I will be QC-ing each one of these shorts in Dodge's Folino Theater, diving head first into the film school's new onlining workflow. Here's to almost reaching the finish line!

Find the Solution

As part of my Editing Emphasis for Dodge College, I am required to cut a handful of Senior Thesis short films. Wanting to challenge myself outside of my comfort zone, I decided to sign on to a Digital Arts VFX Sci-Fi film, a psychological thriller, and a drama. As of now, the VFX and thriller films are in post-production, with the drama scheduled to shoot near the end of February.

The VFX film entitled, Prism has led me to dive deeper into AVID's effect and compositing features, as well as learn how to collaborate with a director to creatively restructure a story. One of the main characters, LARS, is a completely computer generated flying robot who interacts with the film's lead and the environment. As I did not receive any pre-vis from the VFX team, I needed to create it manually within AVID. Using various 360 degree views of LARS, I would keyframe his image to simulate floating. In handheld and tracking shots, I made use of AVID's tracking tool, mapping LARS to the camera movement. With the addition of dialogue, this temporary LARS worked nicely for screenings and also allowed my director to communicate more clearly to the VFX team of how he wanted LARS to move around the screen and be animated.

Following a screening for the Dodge Thesis Committee, my director and I received a handful of notes regarding the logic and overall tension of the film. While moving around various scenes and beats was familiar to me to address the notes given , what came as a surprise was the option of actually creating entirely new shots out of the footage we had. For example, in the first scene we wanted to establish that the main character, Dan, is trying to hide his pastel drawings from LARS. In the original scene, we had an over the shoulder of Dan drawing and then jumping back when LARS comes up behind him. However, the papers can still be seen on the desk in front of him. We decided to make use of Dan's backwards movement to imply him pushing away his drawings, having the VFX team then comp in a blank table top from a different set up. The process reminded me of David Fincher's approach to editing. A few months ago, an Assistant Editor who worked on Gone Girl came to visit my Editing Thesis class. During his presentation, he showed us a short shot comprised of performances that were comped in from different takes. It had never occurred to me until that moment the true power the editor had to directly mold the performances and images presented on screen.

Recently, I have been working closely with my director on my second thesis, Doppelganger. The film was shot and written in a way that relies heavily on the cut hiding or presenting specific information to the audience. As Doppelganger is comprised of three constantly shifting perspectives, I had to follow the script's writing to a T. Each line of prose dictated a cut, proving to be a bit more challenging than I had originally anticipated. My usual approach to editing includes analyzing the script to determine which setups I should make use of to evoke an emotional response from the viewer, and in turn, best tell the story. However, with Doppelganger, I quickly realized the cuts were less motivated by connecting the viewer to the characters, and more showing how one character's actions influenced another. This is definitely one of the more experimental shorts I've cut, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people react to it during screenings.