In the limited time that WideWaterFilms has been in operation, it has produced some of the most stunningly mediocre short-films in the history of mankind. Yet, as Grover once said "where there is life, there is hope."
Therefore, if to serve as nothing more than an object lesson to discourage those of little talent, WideWaterFilms has made the majority of their film vault available on the Internet for your private viewing only, no resposting or broadcasting on Fox allowed. This TEST page uses the embedded Windows Media Player. Depending on your browser you may not see the player, sorry about that.
Please remember that these are silly little items created just for fun. They have been encoded down to a size and resolution suitable for web posting which also makes them appear even worse than normal. They also may include portions that are still under copyright. If you represent a holder, or are just miffed, please e-mail us and we will remove the offending item.
For those that care... my "weapons of choice" used in the creation of these files are VideoReDo (to clean the MPeg2 captures from my Adaptec VideOh board), ProShow Gold (for flicker-free slideshows with the "Ken Burns" Effect), the amazing EditStudio non-linear-editor (with some extra plugins from RosaNegra), and DVD-Lab Studio (to create the DVD menu systems, which you can't see here, but trust me, they are impressive).
I've recently begun learning about subtitles. Wow, it takes an amazing amount of work to prepare them. VisualSubSync makes the job a lot easier.
And, as part of our ongoing "giving back to the community" initiative, we have made our massive DVD clipart collection available to the world.
| Tucson Vacation 2006 (2.1MB, 00:05:10) |
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I have got to learn to keep my mouth shut. Deb and the girls went to visit her parents in Tucson. After they got back, they were looking at the pictures and saying how they needed to print a bunch out and send them. I made the off-hand comment "gosh, too bad we don't have more time, we could record you all talking about the trip and I could make a DVD slideshow out of it." So, guess who was up past midnight for a couple of nights putting all the pieces together. Yep, me. This show features the music of Bill Cushman. The song is Esmovoir and you can hear it and many other great original piano compositions on his Ghost Notes blog. |
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| Amelia Earhart Presentation (1.8MB, 00:04:02) |
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Amelia has a great 3rd Grade teacher who has the kids doing all sorts of interesting things. One of their projects was to research a historical figure and then give an oral presentation as though they were that person. Pretty nifty. When we got the note reminding us that the kids had to bring their props on the day assigned because he had a lot of kids to videotape and not a lot of time for "make up" presentations... I got an idea that sounded good at the time. I offered to take the videos and make a DVD out of them. It was certainly fun working with DV-captured material. But, I didn't take into account the fact that he was borrowing a camera that needed serious cleaning and that he wasn't too comfortable using. Four of the kids had to give their presentations multiple times because I'd get the tape and there would be "issues." On the plus side, one kid had deaf parents and I wanted them to be able to "hear" his presentation so I learned how to do subtitles. I also learned how use playlists and make spiffy menu transitions in DVD-Lab. |
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| A Heart-Felt Holiday (9.89MB, 00:22:09) |
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Progress marches on. Some of us ride floats in the parade as we feel ourselves being drawn to a "bright new future.." While others of us sit on the curb with a bag of snacks and wave as the parade goes by. I'm not too sure which group I fit in yet. Our 2005 Holiday DVD turned out a little odd. I shot the openning scene "on a whim" using my Kodak digital still-camera while we were in Hawaii. I was planning on a whole "island theme" production. Then I got the idea of having the girls ask an animated stick-man about Santa. After spending a whole day messing around with the animation software; I knew it would take too long and I had to go to Plan B. Of course, I didn't have a Plan B. It was then that the girls and I seized on the idea of using puppets. It worked well. So we1l that I used then in any scene that I could. |
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| A Moment with SuperBaby (1MB, 00:02:16) |
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This is an odd little piece. It's a modern "Kodak Moment." We were visiting my parents' house on Halloween (2004) and teasing our new cousin, Lucian, with a laser pointer. He was following it around on the floor and just being darn cute. During the episode, someone commented what a shame it was that we didn't have a video camera. Well... my Kodak CX7430 digital still-camera has a video mode and a 1GB SD card. It certainly isn't anywhere near the quality of a "real" video camera, but I captured this little moment and was able to give my sister a reasonably watchable DVD the next time we saw her. |
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| WideWaterFilms Leader (548KB, 00:00:13) |
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This is the "leader" film that I put at the beginning of all my DVDs. The text ripples due to the "warp" plugin from RosaNegra I've replaced the original (and completely unoriginal) text logo with a fancy new one created by the wonderful and creative people at Harris Graphic Services. |
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| Music Video (1.46MB, 00:03:16) |
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The girls wanted to make a movie as a Valentine's Day present to their Mom. Here they are singing "Accidently in Love." I used the "Old Film" effect in EditStudio for the flashback segments. One of my kids asked "why does it look funny?" I forgot they've been raised in the Age-of-DVDs and have never seen bad black-and-white film. |
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| Wedding Video (3.62MB 00:08:01) |
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No, I wasn't at my parents' wedding back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But I did digitize the deteriorating VHS of the deteriorating super-8 film. And, It's just fun to look at. |
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| The Truth About Horses (1.65MB 00:03:41) |
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This was a surprise. The girls worked out a story and created backgrounds. Then, they asked if I could film them and turn it into a movie. I guess they caught the "movie bug" also. The background music is "Thursday Afternoon" from Bill Cushman's Ghost Notes |
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| Christmas DVD motion menu (5.4MB 00:00:57) |
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We are so proud of this we just had to put it on-line. This is the motion menu for the "Bug & Nat's Christmas 2004" DVD. Some have claimed (and they may be right) that it is better than the movie it leads to. Only the first minute is shown here. We wanted to encode it at a higher quality than normal. |
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| Bug & Nat's Christmas 2004 (7.9MB 00:17:53) |
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This has everything; special effects, music, interviews, bad ballet, and a killer slide-show. It is rumored that Warner Brothers moved up the release date of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" so as not to compete. We have been unable to confirm that. |
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| Santa Babies (5.3MB 00:12:09) |
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This one holds a special place in my heart. It was our first "serious" project (done under our old name of StormCo Filmitoque). The girls were finally old enough to take direction and Amelia did a wonderful job with the opening narration. Watch the credits for some cute bloopers. This set the format we would return to for other movies: short segments ending with a slide-show retrospective of the year. The video is a little jumpy because we still hadn't figured out that we were suffering from a bad case of field-order-reversal. |
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