Mad World is a short film that I wrote, shot and starred in during my senior year in high school. It was my final project for my Digital Video Production class, taught by Hank Richards. About half way through the semester I had brought in a disc of some of the lightsaber rotoscoping I had done and Mr. Richards was so impressed with my work that he let me replace the last few assignments of the year, which I believe was creating a music video, with the production of this project. After assembling a team in class to handle the effects I wrote a quick script to outline the short. It had no story to speak of, we simply didn't have the time. The basic idea was to shoot a short lightsaber duel on campus, pretty cut and dry.

Starring Jay Bishop Dan Glitch Curtis Shaltz Seth Taylor Directed & Written By Dan Glitch Camera Hank Richards Seamstress Kelly Bishop Props Dan Glitch Choreography/Stunts Dan Glitch Jay Bishop Curtis Shaltz Visual Effects Rotoscoping Dan Glitch Curtis Shaltz Seth Taylor Joe Hebertson Video and Sound Editing/Titles Dan Glitch Behind The Scenes Crew Cameras Laurel Schlitt Michael Slone Curtis Shaltz Filmed At Granite Hills High School With A Canon XL1 VIDEO LINKS Mad World (Full Film) Behind the Scenes

After a little trouble with campus security on our first outing, we eventually got the first third or so of the film shot. My crew and I got to work rotoscoping the lightsabers in class, painstakingly frame by frame using ripped filmstrips in Photoshop. My crew learned the technique surprisingly fast but the work still took up a lot of time.    Only being able to work on the shots for an hour each day in class was really holding us back, I eventually started "cheating" by working on it at home. Even that wasn't putting much of a dent in the work load, however. We also had problems getting everyone together to finish filming which was a real bummer. Eventually I realized that I was going to have to cut it short so, with my effects crew helping out, we shot a quick ending (with a stand-in for the Jedi) and I put together the much shorter cut to put a cap on the remaining FX shots we had to do.    In the last weeks of school we turned in our final cut which was unfortunately missing a few FX shots. Despite these omissions we still passed with flying colors, for our instructor saw how hard we worked on the project for three and a half months. After graduation I finished the remaining FX shots and went back to the school to present Mr. Richards with a finished copy. Mad World on its own is nothing special, in fact it's downright embarassing when compared to most other fan works out there, but it's very special to me. Not only did I get to avoid doing regular school work for half of a semester, but I got to do it doing something I enjoy with a bunch of great people. I have very fond memories of being hunched over the computers in the studio cracking jokes with my team wondering if we would ever be finished.