You alive blog? Sorry I neglected you so long. Wish I could say I would continue to update, lets just see how it goes

I entered the 72 hour film festival once again this year, and loved every bit of it. The team we gathered together is really great and was nice to finally force myself to make a film. It always makes me so happy, yet sad that a year goes by and I do so little of it. Well things are changing!

First off, we won Best Film in the festival! This was shocking to say the least, because of some of the other amazing applicants. But I won’t complain Check out the video below…

Calming Heads from michael bartley on Vimeo.

And yes, that is Ken Poore in there(show off).

More info to come about upcoming projects…

Well the film festival was a ton of fun and there were some really good films that were made. Although, to my surprise, several not so good ones as well. Here is the info once again:

This was made during the Grand Cinema’s fourth 72 hour Film Competition in Tacoma, Washington.

A film by Jeff Alldridge

Featuring
Ken Kreps
Michael Bartley
Nick McCord
David Kennedy

Portrait of a YouTube Star: Behind the Scenes of “The Forgotten Heist” (20 Minute Extended Director’s Cut Version)

Heres the short film we created for the Tacoma 72 Hour Film Festival. We had 72 hours to come up with a film. We decided to do a documentary about the creation of another film called, “The Forgotten Heist” (which was also an entry in the festival) and located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuPpFP…

Festival Requirements:
-Must be 5 minutes in length
-Must include the line, “I feel like I’ve been here before”
-Must have at least one scene shot at a museum
-Must have a fortune cookie in a scene
-One scene must incorporate bubbles in some way

Directed by: David Kennedy and Michael Bartley
Edited by: David Kennedy and Michael bartley

Starring:
-Nick McCord as Alfonso Guiterrez Bernard Smith Benson Xing
-Michael Bartley as Michael Bartley
-David Kennedy as Solomon Kennedth
-Jeff Alldridge as Jeff Alldridge
-Ken Kreps as Ken Kreps
-Layne Bukey as Girl in Club
-Patrick Bartley as crew member #1
-Keith Bartley as crew member #2

Film shot in 36 hours (May 2nd, May 3rd) on location in Tacoma, Washington.

And of course if you would like to see it in HD Glory check out this link instead:http://www.vimeo.com/997484

I just wanted to do some hood rat stuff with my friends…

This is nuts! I heard about this story and thought it was odd, but the video is priceless!

Man that poor grandma is already stuck with this kid, and now she has to pay for all of that damage!

Well I have started development on a new video project. It is going very well right now and because I have a hard final date for the showing of the video it is helping push things along. Isn’t that funny that you can have things in your life that you would like to do but find less and less time to spend on it. Yet once there is a deadline in place, you have a blast finishing it.

In this case, I am showing the video at a large work function. Needless to say I wish I could give myself the same type of personal deadlines and goals sometimes.

The second, and more interesting part is that I have a expanded team of people working on this, who several weeks after we complete this (April 18th show date) will be entering the film competition I wrote about before.

We will be shooting most of this weekend and I really hope it comes out alright.

Thats right kids, the 72-Hour film festival is finally approaching and I am excited to say the least!

Basically the premise is that 30 teams of move makers sign up ahead of time and show up to the Grand Cinema Theater on May 1st.

Teams can be no larger than 8 people and you must create everything for your film within the time frame.

On the day of the event you pick several key factors of the video from a hat:
1. Genre of the film!
2. A prop that must be included
3. A line that must be included.

Then once you have those you run screaming out of the theater, only to return within 72 hours to submit your film. They are then judged and brought down to a small set which are then shown to a packed crowd who votes.

Needless to say, I am excited. Here is the current crew:

1. Michael (me, duh)
2. Jeff Aldridge
3. Keith Bartley (For making the soundtrack)
4. David Kennedy
5. And a few select others as we fill out the group.

Wish me luck and I will post more as it gets closer.

Cloverfield.

All together good, contrary to many reviews that I have seen lately.

Now I am not much for the average horror movie, hell anything overly high strung for that matter. But this movie peaked my interest enough to check it out. Great camera work and an intriguing premise helped draw me in and found myself feeling as timid as my on screen counterparts. This movie does really well in putting you in the scene and sharing the emotions of these characters who are just struggling to survive.

One the classic “tie the movie,” together aspects, where the film on the camera that is shooting all of this amazing footage reverts to past tapings. This tried very hard to create caring and back story for the main love interest in the story but I was left wanting more. In fact more jumping in general would have been nice, showing passage of time and requiring the audience to connect the dots a bit more. But they need to cater to the average movie goers who would want an easy to follow and complete storyline.
It won’t win many awards but do advise seeing it in theater as it will lose some of its appeal on video.

So my work had this all hands off site meeting on a Thurs many moons ago. It was from 7AM to 6PM, at this hotel in Redmond, and involved a ton of presentations. It was all pretty interesting, but did get a bit long at times.

The day before my boss came up to me and asked if he could show one of my youtube videos(someone found my videos and told everyone) at the event. He wanted to put it in the middle of the day to break things up.

I told him that if he gave me more time, then I could have made something that would be a much better fit for this type of thing, but that I would pick one and bring it in.

Thinking back to my previous odd and random videos, I started to get worried because none of them would work at all. So I was inspired, I decided to make a video in a night!

After work I ran home and started working at about 6PM.

Needless to say after some help with filming and other actors, a bunch of late night editing, I finished! …………………at about 4 AM

Here is what came out of that:

We were pretty pleased and it went over great at the company wide meeting!

Maybe next time we will have two days to prepare