I feel quite strongly about politics.
And frankly, to me, it gets annoying when people don't vote. They're throwing away their say in the running of the country. And to me, a sixteen year old still bitter about not having a say of my own, it's particularly annoying. So I wanted to make a video to get people up and voting. Hopefully.
It was 11am on a Saturday and I was still in my pyjamas because that's the kind of person I am. And I was lucky enough to have one of those creative bursts of inspiration you get once in a blue moon. Not sure if what came out was as lucky.
I scripted most of this in about 15 minutes, spewing nonsense into Microsoft Word. What came out I wouldn't call cohesive, but it was something. The one problem was the deadline to register to vote was sixteen days away. That's not a lot of time to write, shoot, edit a sketch with enough time left to have an impact. So I bloody rushed it, didn't I?
I finished writing on the Sunday and tried to scramble a small set of actors together over the next few days. I don't work with actors much, so I'll admit it was mildly stressful.
I dragged three bags of equipment into school on the Wednesday and shot it over two hours in some free periods and a lunchtime. This wasn't helped by the fact my original location was in use. Which was annoying to say the least.
There are many bloopers from that shoot. At some point when I have some spare time I'll put them together and upload them - they're just hilarious. Henry breaking into some random opera I didn't understand is my favourite. Or the many, many consecutive takes of 'Awhaw radical" one after the other in rapid fire. Or just any section of that video without context.
Editing did take forever. I mean - you can work it out - it took me until the next Monday. We didn't have any narration track on set - so I had to time all that afterwards and hope we'd left enough time in between the lines.
Oh, and did I mention all the horrific continuity errors? Well, yeah, there are horrific continuity errors. God that annoys me still. Some of them I think are just about tolerable though. They almost get pulled off quite nicely.
Overall, having spent a while timing all the narration and adding some extra shots and adding the titles and music, it did turn out quite well in the end. The colour grade I'm especially proud of. It's a bit odd but I think it looks quite nice.
The only thing I'm hoping now is that it works - and people do register to vote because of it. It's too early to judge at this stage as I'm writing it in the evening after I posted it, but so far it's done quite well. This election is important, and although I presented in a stupid, weird, way, there is an important message here and I really hope it does what I wanted it to.
Will
