The Binder (2003)

A high school student obsessed with a certain cinematic franchise must escape a cruel teacher who stands between him and the awesome movie he wants to see that weekend.

I made The Binder my sophomore year of high school, as the final, individual project in the just-newly-revived videomaking class. At the time, I was (well, still am) a huge fan of The Matrix, and The Matrix Reloaded was coming out very soon. I think this may have influenced me just a tiny bit! ;)

The Binder was shot using my dad's Digital8 Sony Handycam, and edited using Final Cut Pro 1.2. Interestingly I was able to use Final Cut for this one because a copy had somehow fallen into my dad's hands from some co-workers, so I edited the movie on his laptop (a 667 MHz Titanium Powerbook G4).

It's pretty obvious that back then I was already very interested in visual effects, although perhaps just a tad overly-optimistic about my talents in that department! My attempts at recreating the famous Matrix "bullet time" effects came out pretty badly, mostly due to a poorly-colored "bluescreen" and a camera without manual white balancing. (Heck, I didn't even know what white balancing was!) This doesn't take too much away from the movie though, since the whole thing is kind of silly and tongue-in-cheek anyway.

Though the overall plot is fairly simple, this remains one of the more popular projects I've done, probably due to the humorous ending. Thus began my lifetime addiction to twist endings...