Have you ever cut a feature-length film on your home computer? You will.
AT&T won't bring it to you, but 28-year- old Paul Budnitz might. A Yale graduate who majored in fine art, Budnitz edited his feature, 93 Million Miles from the Sun, in his living room.
Budnitz's independent film, which follows four urban nomads as they alternately stave off and induce their own nervous breakdowns, wasn't made using a US$80,000 Hollywood-style Avid film-editing machine. Instead, Budnitz a self-taught cyberkind who wrote videogames for Commodore in high school exploited his techspertise to cut the film digitally on a consumer-grade Macintosh using Adobe Premiere software and a Radius videocard. Budnitz recalls it took some rather joyless hacking to push the software to its outer limits. "Adobe is mostly used for mastering CD-ROMs and fooling around with home movies," he shrugs. "As far as I know, it had never been used to cut a film before."
After Budnitz spent four grueling months dodging error messages, Adobe got wind of the fact that he had produced a film using its software. In return, Adobe agreed to sponsor 93 Million Miles for the 1995 Film Arts Festival in San Francisco. The company also offered to cover postproduction costs for Budnitz's next project in exchange for his help in developing a digital film cutter.
Budnitz has a knack for making things work by the seat of his pants. (He now earns his living by selling used jeans to shops in Southeast Asia.) But while translating that rogue resourcefulness to film, he maxed out a wallet full of credit cards to buy and return hard drives before the 30-day return policy was up. The payoff for playing all that hardware roulette? The entire edit cost only $700, and the whole film, from start to finish (including digital sound postproduction at George Lucas's Skywalker Sound studios), cost a mere $30,000. Despite such low-budget figures, 93 Million Miles is close to major motion picture quality and has already blazed a trail into the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. Deep in planning for his next coup (a film about an opportunistic traveling preacher), Budnitz now receives around six calls a week from young filmmakers who want to follow in his footsteps. "I tell them, OK, I'll tell you how I did it, but I'm not advising you to do this," Budnitz laughs. "It'll drive you mad."
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