Riposte (2004) - Three friends of mine, Tara, Tiffany, and Krystin were making a video for a class. Having just come off of making the work intensive Pixelkicker, I felt I needed a break, so I asked if they wanted to work together. They happily agreed, assigning me editing duties for their next project.

They decided to shoot a fencing video, and took three cameras with them, each of them recording a fencing meet. Afterward they gave me a list of clips that they liked and set me free. One of the first clips they showed me was of a competitor who kept falling down in the match. Apparently, at first this seemed to be because he was off balance, and then became a theme of his overly dramatic nature. So I cut several of these clips together to make it seem like he had been wounded in a match.

They loved it.

What I tried to do with the segments was to give a dynamic presentation of the sport of fencing, showing the excitement and energy of the sport.

As for the technical challenges of the job, their were several. None of the directors had white balanced their cameras, so they all had a different color palet for the same material. In addition, while two of the cameras were the usual Sony TRV 25s, the third was a different kind of camera, with slightly different specifications. And one section of video had already been compressed with some slight artifacting.

In resolving this issue I went with a palet from one of the cameras and matched it. This particular camera showed a pink cast to the fencing uniforms. In an attempt to give the video a richer look I saturated the colors, which gave it deep blacks and a heady brownish-orange look to the basketball court where the meet was held.

In order to heighten the drama I used variable time controls in Final Cut Pro to speed up and slow down the video at certain points. This has become such an ingrained part of common understanding of film and video language that many people find it hardly noticeable until it is pointed out. It was also monumental fun to be able to work with three cameras on the same scene at the end of the video.

The music selection came at the last minute. With only a few hours to decide what to do with the musical content, I brought out several CDs that I had with me. The track that appears on the video is from one of these CDs, a soundtrack for an animated Japanese TV show.

I'm still friends with the directors, Tiffany, Tara, and Krystin, and appeared in one of their 2005 video shorts "Vixens of Vengeance 2" as a backstabbing villain named "Deceptor" that was apparently a fan favorite at the art department's end of the year film festival, the Animation Explosion.

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