Back in November Nikon announced a contest titled Nikon Festival. The challenge was to create a short film that would fit into 140 seconds, inspired by the total number of characters one can use in a Twitter Tweet. Inspired I took up the challenge and decided to go the extra mile to create my short film. Here is the result of efforts and more details after the jump.
So what is the Nikon Festival, you can read about it on their web site if you wish but I’ll give you a quick run down. You know some of it already as I mentioned earlier in this post. There will be two winners picked, the first being the judges pick which will be awarded $100,000 and a Nikon D5000 camera. Yes you read that correctly, ONE hundred thousand big ones! The second winner will be a peoples choice winner and they will receive $25,000 and a Nikon D5000 camera. Pretty darn good for second place! Entries had to be submitted by December 15th so if you’re reading this now it is too late. After the deadline the 3 judges would pick the top 50 videos submitted and on December 22nd the peoples choice voting begin, which is going on now so go check out the top 50 videos and vote for your favorite, the voting ends at 11:59 p.m. January 13th. The winners will be announced shortly after that.
For this adventure I decided to rent a Nikon D300s, Nikon’s latest DSLR camera that also has the ability to shoot 720p HD video. Along with the camera I also rented a Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens. Both items I rented from a San Mateo based company called borrowlenses.com which focuses on camera gear rentals via mail. They have very reasonable prices and the major one is they do not require a hold on your credit card for the entire cost of the equipment you are renting. Many places I looked at locally require a hold on your credit card for the entire cost of whatever you rent. So if you rent a camera body that sells for $2,000 then they will place a $2,000 hold on your card. Not borrowlenses, they only charge you for the rental cost of the equipment and they have very reasonable rates!
The plan, I ordered the D300s and lens as a one week rental option. The rental started the day it was delivered to my home. I had decided to film the Purdue University Camera Club’s trip to Chicago, for those that don’t know I am the advisor for the club. Our trip was planned for December 5th which has become a tradition in the club to go to Chicago in early December just before the end of the semester and the winter break at Purdue. Chicago is always pretty that time of year being decorated for the coming Holiday season.
The camera and lens arrived on time as promised by borrowlenses, they used FedEx 2 day shipping. When I received the camera I spent some time learning about it’s features, specifically the video aspect since I had not used a Nikon camera that was video capable. I shot some test videos and became very comfortable with using it well before our trip. I have to say I was extremely impressed with the D300s, it is an amazing camera. My primary camera is a Nikon D200 which the D300 replaced in 2007. The follow-up D300s was just released in the fall of 2009 with only minor differences over the D300 except for the video capability which the D300 did not have. Our trip to Chicago was amazing, the day turned out to be really good as the weather cooperated. We spent the day wondering around the city and taking photographs of this magical place. At sunset many of us, as we normally do, gathered at Shed Aquarium to take a panoramic of the awesome skyline, it was a gorgeous sunset that day. Afterwords we headed back downtown to eat at the amazing Giordano’s Pizzeria. This has become the traditional spot for us to eat and after a day of being in the cold and walking miles, to sit down to some wonderful stuffed pizza and get warm is a great way to end the day. The whole day I shot video hoping I would have some great stuff to tie together for my short film. I think some of my best stuff was in the evening when the lights of the city looked wonderful. At one point during the day I was walking around and decided to shoot some video utilizing the fisheye and pointing the camera at the ground. This allowed me to capture my feet walking as people passed me by, this provided a really cool perspective and was a piece I used in the final short film.
In the end I produced what I thought was a nice little short film. I looked around until I found just the right musical score that really went with the mood of the film. It took me two days of looking and listening to snippets of I don’t know how many songs before finding just the right one. With great excitement and feeling of accomplishment I uploaded my short film to the Nikon Festival site. Although my film was not chosen as one of the 50 finalist I am not disappointed. This was a lot of fun to do and I learned so much shooting, editing and producing this short film. The entire experience has put a bug in me to do more of this type of work in the future. I aspire to some day have a Nikon camera that can do video so I can create even better short films and who knows where that might go!
To anyone who reads this I would say take the leap of faith the next time you see a contest or something that challenges you to do something you have not done before. Sure I dropped some money and time on this little adventure. Did I think I would win, not really but that isn’t the point. To me I did something different, I went out on that limb and I don’t regret it. It has given me some experiences and pushed me into a realm I truly want to explore more of. Will I become the next James Cameron or Martin Scorsese? I highly doubt it but I will pursue making more short films and if anything have a heck of a good time doing it.
So what would you do with 140 seconds?
~ William