I was impressed with the creativity of many of the short films, which showed originality in concepts and execution. The “Last Dance” video, which was lens on a RED One camera, was beautifully shot and well done. I am still amazed that this was put together by high school students, great job! Below is the video preview for the Short Film Night, including an excerpt from “Last Dance”.

Day 2 and 3 have been pretty eventful here at the Manitoba Film Training Expo. A lot of the discussion has focused on the RED Camera and it’s market penetration into the feature film industry. The RED Camera is really a computer with a lens on it, with various versions of the O/S software running on the computer. This seems to be part of the appeal with the Red Camera; in that you can receive firmware updates for it that can improve the functionality of it, without replacing hardware.

Coming from a TV background and not a film background, the RED workflow seems pretty foreign to me since it works more like the feature film workflow does. It records RAW data (the digital negative) and you manipulate it in post production.

RED can shoot up to 4K, which is an insanely high resolution, it is about 4 thousand pixels high, while standard NTSC TV’s are 486 pixels high; that’s a lot of data!

There were people from Mid-Canada Productions present with an edit suite set-up to show some of the RED post-production workflow.

The edit suite in this photo was running the SPARK software, which is made especially for RED r3d files, which was then lopped through an Avid Symphony Nitris DX.

We have spent a lot of time interviewing people in the film industry; DOP’s to PA’s, to get their perspective on what Manitoba has to offer the film industry. We also talked to people in FTM’s Aboriginal Training program to see what their experiences have been like in entering the film business.

Over all, a very enlightening Expo, and even though I wasn’t an official participant, I still learned a lot just be getting b-roll and interviewing people. There was a lot of great discussion from film professionals about the changing nature of the industry, and how the art of storytelling is progressing with these new tools.