Editing a Feature Length Film for the First Time

Back in the spring of this year, 2021, myself and a group of some of my fellow film students began work on a concept for our first feature film together. My friend, Wyatt Bumbarger, headed the production as our writer & director, and came up with a script for a horror film called A Deer in the Woods. 

“When a group of amateur film students set out to shoot a horror film in a secluded cabin in the woods, they slowly begin to realize they may be trapped in a horror film themselves.”

Soon after, we finalized the rest of our cast and crew positions and we were off filming sometime in mid-april. I had volunteered to be the gaffer, or chief lighting technician, for on set work as well as the lead editor in piecing together the final product. The technical and logistical problems of shooting a feature length film with legitimately no budget has been nothing short of a nightmare, but our team has made it work. I remind myself often that as young creatives we may not have the advantage of unlimited resources or the budget of a Hollywood production. However, our one advantage is TIME. There’s something to be said about putting in the hours and trying to be thrifty with what we have in the hopes to make something greater than we originally could have imagined. 

But now it has come down to me. As we grow nearer to finishing principal shooting, I have begun to feel the pressure on me as the editor to bring things all together. The saying goes that a film is actually written three times. Once in the screenplay. Once during shooting. And lastly in the editing room. It’s thereby my job for the final rewrite. In the coming weeks, I will be collecting and storing all the Terabytes worth of raw footage, and with this has come a lot of nervousness. This is the first feature film I have ever worked on. I know that it is still only a student run production, but I truly want this film to be something that we all can look back on and be proud of. 

In the next few months I will be sharing my journey in editing this film with all of you in hopes that you will maybe gleam some interesting insights about the process for your own work. I am sure that I will be learning so much along the way and the lessons and experience gained from working on this project will be far more valuable to me than working as a production assistant on any multi-million dollar production. 

If you are at all interested in supporting our production I’ll link them here, but regardless thanks again for reading and look out for more. 

Indie GoGo - A Deer in the Woods

- Matt Nickolaus

My First Experience with Black and White Film Photography…

So finally after weeks of waiting I received back my first roll of black and white film from the lab. It felt like I was a kid opening a present on Christmas morning and is still one of my favorite aspects of film photography. I’ve really only been shooting on celluloid for about a year now, but during that time I have exclusively shot on C-41 color film. So I was incredibly interested in the differences of how the process would be with black and white. I grabbed a roll of T-max 400 and went out with one of my friends and fellow photographers, Chris Alderfer, to the small Pennsylvania town of Victorian Bellefonte. 

Not fully knowing where to go we drove through the town stopping at an auto body shop and eventually heading to the park downtown. We were surprised to see a park full of people listening to polka music performed from a one man band in a gazebo. People were dancing and laughing. It was something out of old America that has long been lost. Naturally we grabbed our cameras and had a great time shooting the scene. 

I found myself wishing that I had color film instead of black and white at some instances, but I finished the roll anyways. One thing that I’d heard was that the black and white stocks tend to not have nearly as much dynamic range as color stocks. This made me a little nervous in trying to be more precise in exposing my images. But looking back after the development process I definitely won’t feel as worried about pushing the film a little bit more in the future. Other than the longer amount of time it took the lab to process the film, I was exceptionally happy with the whole process. After the images came back I just added a bit more contrast in Lightroom to give the shadows a bit more richness and I was done. Definitely excited to experiment more with black and white in the future. Who knows maybe I’ll have to investigate more into my own home development? 

Anyways let me know your thoughts on a few of these image from my first roll of black and white and thank you for following along!

- Matt Nickolaus

Is it Worth Starting a Blog in 2021?

At 21 years old the internet is almost two decades older than me and I have no room to judge what type of content will or will not be relevant. The digital space is stuffed to the brim with exciting apps from Tik Tok to Twitter and as a creative it’s so hard to determine where to share my work and my experiences. So why with all these options out there already is it worth starting a blog, a decades old method of internet content? The truth is I have no idea.

But what I do know is why I am starting my own blog in 2021. 

I am a young photographer and filmmaker trying to make my way in this world. However, I have had many creative struggles over the past year from the pandemic to my own more personal family crisis. As a result, it’s been very difficult to find some momentum and consistency with my creative projects throughout this turbulent period. My confidence has been really shaken with all of these paths laid out in front of me and not sure where to go or how to share the things I create. 

I began looking for guidance from my usual source, from Youtube. I came across a video from Ali Abdaal, How Writing Online made me a Millionaire, where he talked about his difficulties in initially starting his blog in 2016 while he was still a college student. I won’t try to summarize his video (definitely give it a watch if you are considering starting a blog in any capacity), but I related so heavily to some of his fears in putting myself out there. The thoughts like, “What will my friends & family think?”, “Will I actually make anything original?” and ”Why would anyone read my stuff anyway?”, were all questions that have been bouncing around in my head. However, the benefits of starting out-weigh any fear that could be holding me back. 

Ali’s main point towards the benefit of starting a blog was that it creates the space for you to learn how to articulate the ideas in your head and then share them with the rest of the world. This is one of the main reasons I am choosing to start this blog because at the very least it will be a practice in finding my own voice and going through the motions of creating and sharing something small everyday. In the video Ali recommends a book that has immensely impacted his life called Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. Needless to say I quickly bought the book and am now a huge advocate of it as well. 

Kleon goes through and gives some great advice to any creative about trying to share your work and build a following. One thing particularly stuck out to me in his section ‘Share Something Small Everyday’ was on carving out a space on the internet for yourself that you can call your home base. With the bustle of every new social media app it’s often hard to keep up. But if you have your own domain that’s the central location for everything that you create, it can make the idea of sharing your work on the internet substantially less daunting. (Luckily it’s easier now more than ever to create your own good looking website with any one of the services out there on the internet). 

In the same chapter Kleon discusses the idea that if you release something small everyday, like a blog post, that it can compound into something greater than you could even imagine. “One little blog post is nothing on it’s own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.” Not to mention that each time you add something onto the internet it’s sharing your work even while you sleep, 24/7, 365 days a year. Therefore the more you share the more you get seen.

I don’t pretend to have any of this figured out on my own. I realize that even going back and reading this article itself that I have so much to learn about what makes good internet writing, but that’s the point of all this. So that you can have a space to share and grow as you go down whatever path you wish to follow and carve out your own little section of the internet to call home. It is scary and difficult to start, but you must do it anyways and trust me you’ll be glad that you do. 

- Matt Nickolaus