Hi from the Bay Area, Califronia

[Von Richter]

Hi all. Bay area (SF) here as well.

Interesting stuff there, Leo! I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before.

Cheers,
-VR

[Brian Lukrich]

Graduating from film school in Portland, OR. Moving back to SR.

Wealth of knowledge in all of video production. LOVE Producing and field sound recording.

Brian

[Brent Tam]

I know someone that recently participated in the Scary Cow Co-Op and he said it was a great experience. After seeing this thread I think I may seriously consider it as well.

Any updates on how it went? Axel/Garrett did you end up joining?

[Axel Scheffler]

Originally Posted by Brent Tam

I know someone that recently participated in the Scary Cow Co-Op and he said it was a great experience. After seeing this thread I think I may seriously consider it as well.

Any updates on how it went? Axel/Garrett did you end up joining?

I'm with Scary Cow since last year but due to time conflicts I never participated in a movie making event. My biggest problem is that most of the people are coming from SF and since I'm in San Jose I can not make it during the week, the traffic is a killer and my working hours too :-( But one day I will have my chance.
At the moment they had last weekend the ninth pitch meeting so new projects are upcoming in the next weeks. Even when you can not make it to a pitch meeting there is in the members area a possibility to see them as video online.

Axel

[Garrett Low]

Hi Brent,

I am a Cow now. Been since Sep 08. It has been a great experience. My first experience with the group I worked on a great project shooting a recording session at Fantasy studios of the Tuvan throat singing band Huun Huur Tu. That project morphed out of Scary Cow relm because we hired a professional director to aid in the week long shoot. I was a camera operator and am currently working on editing the promo video for the band. They just released the album and in August they will be hopefully ready to release the documentary for the making of the album. That's what I'm editing now. A teaser for the movie.

This last round I worked on two projects as the Director of Photography. One, a scifi short, had a lot of challenges because 95% of it was shot on green screen. Very challenging lighting set ups and a lot of learning about how to shoot for keying.

The second project called RE:Invention was a short documentary, about 10minutes. That one turned out really good and won some funding awards. For this round we are continuing with the story line and making a 30 minute version in hopes of getting it into some other festivals and maybe even trying to get some PBS stations to air it. You can see the short here:

YouTube - RE:Invention

Note that YouTube did something horrible to the video so the motion looks really bad.

There are a lot of really great people involved and a lot of knowledge and sharing of ideas. In the short time I've been with them I've seen the quality and production value of the movies go up exponentially with each round.

Axel, one of the members of our RE:Invention team is from Menlo Park so it's not impossible. I live in Novato and work in Oakland so there's a lot of traveling for meetings but the pitch meetings happen only about once every 4 months. As you mentioned all of the pitches can be seen on line if you are a member. There seems to be a shortage of Cinematographers too. Due to time constraints and the amount of effort I'm going to be putting into RE:Invention I think I'll only work on one movie this round. But I've been approached by 4 other teams that asked if I'd DP their projects.

SC is a really good place to learn a lot and be able to pick up skills that you want to learn. I'm now even contemplating writing a screenplay and producing a movie.

Brent, as I said I work in Oakland so if you want to meet for lunch or something to discuss it just shoot me an email.

Garrett

[Leo Versola]

Hi guys,

Nice to see a few of you ended up joining Scary Cow. The great thing about participating in the group is that films are being made and screened in a public theater every three months in a friendly competitive atmosphere.

This last round (Round 8) there were 19 short films screened including a 30-minute one that I DP'd on using an HPX-170/SGBlade combo called 'Goodbye Mr. Jordan' which won awards for Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Cinematography and Outstanding Original Music Score as well as budget awards from IMDB recognized judges. We're now in the process of submitting it to a number of other film festivals...

During Round 6, I DP'd on a 15-minute short called 'Rule 1' shot with an HV20/Letus Extreme which also won the Member's Award, General Audience Award, Best Directing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Editing and Best Sound and Two Judge's awards.

Money is awarded to the winning teams as budget for their next films, and ours resulted in about $5,000 in prizes over two rounds. Not a ton of money, but it definitely helps defer some of the cost of producing the films.

Garrett is being a little modest, but the film he worked on won the Member's award and a Judge's award (no easy task the first time out)... Congratulations Garrett!!!

As Garrett said, the quality of films has been steadily rising and it has really pushed me to try and improve my skills in so many different aspects of filmmaking.

If anyone's interested, you can view most of the films from each of the rounds at: Scary Cow Productions

Cheers!

[Garrett Low]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the kind words. I didn't get to see Goodbye Mr. Jordan on the big screen but I watched it on the SC sight. Great camera work. Congrats on the awards.

All I can say is, working on these projects is very addictive and the SC group is a great bunch of people. I need to figure out how to make enough money so I don't have to have a "real" job.

Garrett