Summer film fest / Rabbit remastered

One of my summer goals is to create an online portfolio of my best short movies so they can be watched together marathon-style. To do this, I've upgraded my Vimeo account so I can upload larger files.

The first movie I uploaded was my latest half-hour, CEFN Senior Gala Extravaganza – A Motown Review that I made for non-profit organization CEFN.

Then I added Creating Fashion with Laurel: Fabric Shopping. Most of our episodes have been instructional videos, but this one works as a movie.

Not wanting to exclude my earlier efforts, I dedicated my free time this week to remastering The Plastic Club Rabbit Festival with Dreaming Thomas. I made that one in 2019 after a day of following my friends around The Plastic Club's annual talent show.

Now it looks like this:

The original version was edited in HitFilm Express. Since I now use Adobe Premiere Pro, I recreated my edit in Premiere using the orginal audio track as a guide to align all the clips. That was the hard part.

The fun part was applying what I've learned in the past couple of years to clean up the general quality. The color and audio are better now and some of the shakier shots have been stabilized. I also trimmed it by about four seconds to tighten up the pacing.

The biggest difference is the suppression of a bird singing during Dreaming Thomas' performance of the Beatles' "I’ve Just Seen a Face". Removing too much cuts into the song, but I've managed to switch the bird from lead singer to backup vocals.

Dreaming Thomas, original version


Dreaming Thomas, revised version


Next in my sights is remastering Big Mess at the Troc (also edited with HitFilm in 2019) and updating my demo reel, but I need to get back to working on Episode 13 of CFWL to make the PhillyCAM deadline. More of this after.