The Birth of "Chuck The Cucumber"

The trail to Senior Seminar begins with this video, my first experiment in Psychedelic editing.  I used a video I shot at work on my cell phone as the base layer.  Next, I ran the video through Final Cut 7's vector, fisheye, and implosion plugins.  I then painstakingly assembled, masked, and layered the clips using the Linux NLE Cinelerra... Which was a bitter-sweet experience.

Cinelerra's Masking Tool.

Cinelerra has a great color corrector, intuitive masking, a strong assortment of plugins and features, and will "eat" almost any format you throw at it (precisely how compatible it is is another story...).  BUT - the UI is vomitously ugly and occasionally bug-prone.  I attribute this to it's relatively minimal amount of funding and development.

I layered images I edited with GIMP, an open source Photoshop-type program, and ran more distorted footage through another Linux NLE, OpenShot.  Think Windows Movie Maker with actual functionality and very strong plugins.  I then pieced everything together in Cinelerra.

"Running Chucks" in Openshot. 

This project showed me how different editors and work flows can influence your project.  For example, Apple has a very specific picture of how one should edit and this reflects in their program.  The Cinelerra community has the same thing in different form.  By using all of these different NLE's and plugin sets, you can craft a truly unique work- an amalgam of proprietary and community-driven genius.  

*I recorded and edited the audio for "Chuck" in Ardour2, a Linux DAW.  I'll go over Ardour in a separate post.