Monthly Archives: August 2010

Supercar Spin

Supercar Spin Pilot show – it’s ready for the world to watch

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Note, all the official Supercar Spin articles will be on www.supercarspin.com from now on.

This has been a project I’ve been keen to spend my spare time on with Brendon over the past month. After looking around all the YouTube and iTunes/iPod Podcasts all around the world, I couldn’t find a good monthly news show on all the juicy bits on supercars, sports car and luxury car news that car nuts just love to know about. So I had this idea of putting together a pilot episode of a monthly news show where we sift through the month’s huge pile of Press Releases from the automotive industry, and bring the viewer just the best bits so they don’t have to.

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A scene from the show talking about the price of the new Porsche 918 Spyder

Brendon was a bit hesitant to give it a go as he thought he would be bad on camera (the results show that was a false worry, he was even more natural than me I think) but I convinced him and we recorded it at his place with his lovely hand drawn picture of a Red Zonda as the background.

We felt we had got it right on the 3rd take and it was shot in one long continuous take to try and make it more natural, less edited. We were hoping for more of a feeling of two guys who are nuts about cars just talking about the latest gossip and adding their own opinions to the mix.

Brendon’s friend Martin DeMontfort www.mdillustration.com created the logo for us on his computer by hand using his graphics tablet and the final version with its tyre marks looks great! Martin hand draws a lot of the covers for the Australian MAD magazine so we knew he would do a great job at the logo. I altered the image with a Red Zonda to make it stand out more for the iTunes/iPod Podcast library featured logo.

supercarspinlogo The Logo hand drawn by Martin The iTunes/iPod Podcast logo

My friend Jay Ng (a local short film director) gave some advice on how to make the titles stand out more and other little bits of production advice through the project. The best bit of advice from him was to actually try and give it a go in the first place after I told him the original idea some months ago. Jay also came up with the all important catchy name ‘Supercar Spin’ which is much better than the working title we had ‘Supercar monthly news’ 🙂

Filming was done using my Sony HD video camera and a external miniature microphone taped to the desk in front of us and all the post-production was done in Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop like I do all my videos in now.

Overall I’m very happy with the results of the pilot show which is after all a bit of a test to see how it came out. I added a header to the video at the top of the screen to ask for comments and feedback Good OR Bad because we really want to know wether to make another episode. The video was only 2 hours on YouTube and we received our first comment which was great:

“I liked the show in my opinion it was filled with a lot of information in a small package. I hope you get enough support from the viewers to continue producing the show.

Thumbs up.”

If we get more positive feedback we will have a go at our real first episode 1. I have submitted the video to the Apple iTunes/iPod Podcast library but unlike YouTube, Apple have to watch and approve the video first for content and quality before it is approved and allowed to go up on iTunes. If it does get through it will be viewable by anyone in the world with a iPhone or iPod by just by typing in ‘Supercar Spin’ which could open up the video to 1000’s of views a day.

So enough talking about it, here is the actual show to watch (click to play).
If you want to watch it in Full HD you can view the HD version.

Please, let me know what YOU think of it?

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Working on a short film – ‘Empty’

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I have been working on a short film called ‘Empty’ over the last few weeks with director Jay Ng who I worked with on the short film ‘’The Poker Table’ last year for Sony Tropfest  View it here on YouTube.

This film like last one is a pretty intense and dark film penned by Jay Ng himself, it makes me wonder what kind of dreams the guy has at night! 🙂 The film is about a young women Anna who returns to her office job after a terrible accident and the series of lifelike flashbacks that she imagines (or not) as she try’s to return to her boring office job. As said the story and script are pretty intense and dark, have a read of one of the pages from the script below:

empty script

All the crew, actors and extras had fun filming over the 3 and a half days of shooting with lots of fake blood, drilling into baby dolls heads and between takes lots of laughter. A lot of the crew form ‘The Poker Table’ were called back with myself acting as chief on camera or ‘Director of Photography’ for the wanky term. All the crew were all playing their parts well in this short film and we felt like we were more professional and gelling as a team more compared to the last film, which was great.

Here are some photos from the first 2 days shooting.

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Setting up for a scene in a warehouse

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I had to learn how to use a pretty serious video camera

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Applying some fake latex skin and patches of
blood to make a dead like arm and hand 

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One of the actors playing out a scene where he drills a baby dolls head

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Me on camera filming in the ladies toilets for a mirror scene

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Washing the car + no roof

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I washed the new car at Brendon’s the other day on a cool late winters day. Its amazing how clean a Black car looks just after you give it a good clean, basically everything but the internal aluminium interior is Black and it all shines a deep Gloss Black.

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There were a lot of swirl marks on the Black paint I noticed, basically from the car being taken to bad car washes in its 3 year life in Melbourne so far. I got in contact with the guy who details all of Lamborghinis cars for them and he detailed the car inside and out over a day at the Lamborghini service centre. The body work apart from a couple of tiny stone chips on the nose looks like new like it has just left the factory.

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I also bought a soft top roof from a guy in Melbourne from the Lotus club. I got it half price at $700 which was a good deal as it is brand new. It didn’t fit his Exige as he has a roll cage fitted but fits mine, and it means I can enjoy some open top motoring again once the weather warms up.