The High School Movies of Mike Hanley

The North Hills Pictures are the collection of short DV movies I made in Mr. Bellissimo's movie-making classes at North Hills High School in Pittsburgh, PA. For a long time, they made up the largest chunk of my creative work. Additionally, over the years I continued to use these four shorts to improve my editing skills by putting together several fake "trailers" for the anthology, in various styles.

In 2007, as part of the process of creating the initial version of my website, I went back to the original master files for these movies, and reprocessed them with much better de-interlacing than they were previously given. I also recompressed them using the much more modern H.264 codec, and later uploaded them to YouTube once it became obvious which way the wind was blowing for distributing video on the web. The versions you'll find here are the best these movies have ever looked, and not far from original quality, given the limited technology and knowledge I had back when I produced them…

This section of the site has been carried through several iterations for "historical" reference, but given how old these films are now, don't expect any big changes here.

DVD

During my senior year of high school, I prepared a DVD of the movies I had made to give to the friends who had helped me make them. (This is what the first fake trailer is referring to.) Be warned: This DVD predates the 2007 "remastering" process, and so the films may be a bit "blockier" looking than they should be. However, this is an exact image of the DVD I handed out to people back then, so hopefully it may be of some value to someone.

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To play this DVD, you must burn it to a DVD. Consult the documentation that came with your DVD burner to find out how to burn a "Disc Image" – it will probably be different from just dragging the file onto an empty disc!

DVD Image File

If there's enough demand I may release a new, remasterd DVD. (But I doubt there's enough demand!)

The Trailer Project

Even after these four movies were done, I found ways to play with them. As a form of editing practice, I started cutting together fake "trailers" for the North Hills anthology, set to various well-known examples of trailer music. The first was shown during the TV announcements at my High School to announce the availability of the above DVD. The "Sin City" trailer makes a bit of a visual departure from the actual shorts, and takes on the look of its namesake. It's probably the best of the three.

"Requiem" (2005)

"Sin City" (2006)

"Pistolero" (2007)

Fair warning: It is widely believed that some of these trailers make the movies look much more interesting and exciting than they actually are!

LEGAL: These trailers use commercial, copyrighted music. They were made purely as an educational experience, and no profit is being made from them. As such, it is believed that they would fall under the category of "fair use." If, however, you are the owner of any of the music tracks, and do not approve of their use on this website, contact me, and I will remove them immediately.