Back story
It all started last summer when I was editing a short documentary piece for intro to editing at Ai. I had a lot of fun with it because it reminded me of all the steps I took to make most of the airsoft videos that I have made for AP events. I PM'd a friend and asked him if he would be interested in being involved in a short doc about him as a player and a person in the real world. He was (and still is) in Iraq at the time so I had to wait a while. The Idea kept brewing in my mind and I wanted to try out a few practice runs on other people.
I needed to put outside videos on back order for a few weeks due to finishing to the Grid 18 Redux video and several class assignments that would evolve much of my time. One day I handed in an assignment that was a self portrait of myself. I couldn't really come up with anything artsy so I filmed myself surfing the web, cleaning my airsoft guns and I even threw in a few shots of me from CQC6. Needless to say people were concerned and my teacher gave me a long critique about VT and warning signs of violence. He also showed concern that I might be at risk as being scene as a militia member. I reassured him that it was just a game and showed him the nearly completed Grid 18 Video. He loved it and said that he wanted me to make a short documentary for my final project about the community and a few of it's members.
It's not very often when you get to make an airsoft video and get a school grade for it. So as you can imagine I was excited to say the least. The person that I really wanted to follow was still away in Iraq so I had to settle for Randal and Bill.
Not long after I started planning to film the project, AONW had their replicas seized by the BATFE. It seamed as if my fun little project needed to become a much larger cause. I decided that this short would not be enough and that it would simply be a mock up for what I needed to do for the community. I believe that a full hour to ninety minute doc about us and how we live life outside of airsoft would be the perfect thing to use as a tool to inform the outside world just what we are. To tell them that we are just a bunch of nerdy guys who only want to hang out with our friends and have fun. We are not a threat, we do not want to be a scary militia, we just want UNDERSTANDING from the rest of society.
Onto the video.
What I have here is the short documentary that I submitted for my Digital Video Production class at AI (that I mentioned earlier). This was my final project and it generated much interest amongst the other film students. Most of them had never heard of it and some thought it was paintball. Everyone loved the idea and gave me a lot of feedback about it. So here it is. Let me know what you guys think about the idea. I plan on taking my time with this (about 9 months to a full year) before it will be a completed project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpJ7aAlUbaE
For those of you wondering. This is why the Faction Wars video hasn't been worked on yet.
