Well, we made it!  After long gruelling hours of filming into the wee hours of the morning, and even more hours of editing, re-editing, colour correcting, recording foley and voice over, re-colour correcting, colour grading, and finally re-editing again, we have completed and submitted Intruder: our entry into My RØDE Reel 2016!  First, I’d like to say thanks to those of you who contributed to the project, you made it as good as it is and we’re so grateful for that!  Now is the time when all the submissions will be reviewed by the judges for the competition and by the community.  The judges will determine the winners of all the technical awards and of the Judge’s Choice awards, but it’s you in the community who get to vote for your favourite film.  The film with the  most votes will receive the People’s Choice award, which is very awesome!  We’d all love it if you could head over to this link: HERE and vote for our film.  We’re all really happy with the end result, we think it looks great!

We all had high hopes for this project even before we started.  At first of course, everyone dreams big and near the beginning of the production process, we dared not to expect too much.  We encountered delays, incurred a couple of extra expenses, and ended up having to work with a smaller crew than we anticipated, but luckily we didn’t let that get us down.  We pushed through it and endured the cutting of shots in editing, the compromises of timing and atmosphere and all pulled our hair out a little bit I’m sure, but when we viewed the finished product, we were happy.  It’s a rare thing in my experience to pass off a project to the next phase and be satisfied with the result.  I’ve come to love all the short films I’ve done in the past eventually, but there was always something nagging at me each time it got entered.  This time though, when I hit the submit button on the RØDE website, I was content with what we’d made.  Of course there will always be things that I notice when I watch it again in the future that might nag at me a little, but knowing that we stretched ourselves and stepped outside of our comfort zone and still ended up with a result this good will always leave me satisfied, no matter what the results of the competition are.  Obviously we’d love to win, there are some unreal prizes available this year!  So again, go vote!  But the important thing is that we’ve already accomplished so much and the film has only just been submitted.  We set out to do four things with this project:

1. Connect with some local talent that we can work with again in the future.
2. Learn about and gain experience with raising and handling a budget.
3. Create a product that forced us to further develop our skills as filmmakers.
4. Win some cool stuff!

During the whole production process, we successfully connected with the very talented Joe Jomaa, raised a budget of over $1000 for the first time and used it effectively, and while I can only speak for myself and how much I’ve learned and grown as a filmmaker, I’m sure Kyle and Chris would say they have as well.  I’ve learned some of the finer details of colour correction and grading, I pushed my cinematography skills to the max and I must have put at least some muscle on holding that camera up over my head so much (bonus)!  Plus we all learned that camera cranes are heavier than we thought, and we need a better tripod for future endeavours.  In short I wouldn’t change anything about my experience shooting this film.

Everything that went wrong taught us something,
and everything that went right, went very right.

So in closing, I’ll just say thanks again to everyone who contributed to the project and also to everyone who put up with us while we sunk our time into making this film.  Once again, you can head over to the My RØDE Reel page to vote for Intruder and give us a shot at the People’s Choice award.  We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on our next short film project, likely coming up around the fall.  Until then, go check out our other work on our YouTube channel.