Guerrilla independents: these post pros thrive in unconventional environments where their innovation and creativity comes to the forefront - brief profiles of independent digital media companies - Company Profile

Post, March, 2003 by Christine Bunish

Morse hadn't considered himself an editor before the Media Composer arrived in his apartment He had used early versions of Adobe Premiere for home editing before and didn't enjoy the experience. For The Adulterer, Morse hired a lead Avid editor, David Kother, who did the first cut and an editing team who picked up the reins when the lead editor was not available. A member of that team, Steve Perrotta, showed Morse how to use the Media Composer, and soon he was hooked. "I found myself waking up and saying we should try this with this scene," he recalls. "Media Composer has a wonderful interface; it's a great piece of equipment." After finishing The Adulterer (www.theadulterer.com), which won Best of Fest at the Sarasota Film Festival in February Morse bought his own Xpress DV. "I steer all my students toward Xpress DV," he says. "It has pretty much the same interface as Media Composer but a smaller footprint. I have a dual-monitor set-up -- you really need that for any editing project."

Morse is currently cutting a feature-length documentary on the Appalachian Trail, which he is making with his wife. "We spend seven to 10 days at a time in the field," he says. "We're shooting on Mini DV with Sony's TRV-900 3-chip camera. We initially wanted to tape people who were quitting the trail: 2,000 to 3.000 people start but only 200 to 300 complete the trail's 2,100 miles. But when we got out there it became apparent we had to interview and hike with as many people as we could, including those who were doing well."

Morse finds Xpress DV "easily handles massive amounts of footage," which is key to his documentary project. "Hard disk space is very cheap now, about $1 a GB. We have 300 gigs to hold hours and hours of material. Because we put digital video in and and get digital video out, there's no quality loss. We don't deal with Avid video resolutions: We see what we're going to get."

Morse says, "having an Avid in my home allowed me to say, 'I can do this.' Editing isn't about physically making cuts; it's about scenes, drama, pace, story."

The only downside he sees to guerrilla independent-style post is "because the equipment is so readily available, people go out and buy it without having a project. They think the technology is going to make them a filmmaker."

FROM ROCK TO VIDEO

Another apartment-based guerrilla independent is Kristian Kostov. A rock star in his native Bulgaria, he emigrated to Canada with his band in the mid- 1990s but didn't exactly take North America by storm. So Kostov parlayed his interest in the power of sound and picture -- he performed with projected images he had created and synched songs and visuals -- to co-found the Montreal-based video company, La Boite Orange.

Last year Kostov sold his interest in the company and decided to strike out on his own as TranceFormMind Entertainment (www.tranceformmind.com), a company that combines his multimedia and audio skills (Kostov ran an audio studio half-a-dozen years ago). "I feel more free," says Kostov of his new enterprise. "The corporate world was more stressful and not meaningful." But as a guerrilla independent he acknowledges that "some projects are refused to us because we're independent. When you're trying to convince someone to spend $50,000 to $ 100,000 on a project, they want a more corporate environment."