NZA - I got a sneak peak at the competition

Seattle time zone

Yesterday was Friday in New Zealand and Rajneel was scheduled to finish the mixing on his film. I believe that Andres is scheduled to finish tomorrow (Sunday, NZ time).

The first three films (Tim's "Mr Frosty and the BMX Kid," Kristi's "Something Special," and Aya's "Sweet As") are in the can, and Rajneel and Andres are almost done. I got a sneak peak at the first three in QuickTime format (because I'm the spouse of one of the finalists, right?) and I will grudging concede that Tim and Aya did great work. I found both films to be entertaining, attractive and compelling. Although, with apologies to the great child actor in Tim's film, I only understood about half of what he said. I eagerly await the last two films.

Okay, enough about the riff-raff (kidding!). Kristi's film ROCKED!* The last time I saw it was in the mixing studio which had a massive sound system and a huge screen. The screen was kinda low-res for the size, but that was fine since the point was audio mixing, not color grading (a process I did not get to see). So it was really cool to see it in hi-def where the gorgeous colors and breath-taking beauty of New Zealand really POP. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the sound while converting to QT format, and Kristi is working with them to get that corrected before it goes live on the website. Between the voice-over track, the music and sound-effects, the audio is about 2/3 of the total story, so it is vital that it be fixed before going live so that people can actually experience the story properly. Everyone at the premier in the mixing study was blown away by the total package, so we know it rocks and look forward to getting that fixed.
(* I will confess to possibly, maybe, thinking about suffering a little bias. But ONLY a little.)

I'll post again here when Tourism New Zealand goes live with the films.