Gunner Palace

I just got finished watching a documentary called Gunner Palace. It is about a group of soldiers who were in Iraq to provide security after everyone declared that the war was officially over. The movie gets its title from the fact that this group of soldiers were stationed in Saddam's son Uday's party palace.

The palace is huge and it was pretty bombed out, but the good news for the soldiers was that the pool was fully functional and they had a driving range and putting green out back as well.

Gunner Palace was a pretty solid little flick. It really let the soldiers tell their story, but I can see what some people were saying about it in that there were a lot of different soldiers instead of sticking with one or two and following them. But they did stick with Stuart Wilf a lot. Other than that the only problem I had was the narrator's voice, which was the director/camera guy of the film. You could tell that he was trying too hard to sound like this great voice instead of simply telling the story.

It really put a lot of focus on music and all of it was generated by the soldiers themselves. A lot of doodling on guitars and tons of rapping.

What really drew me to this movie was how they made it. They basically ordered up a couple of Canon miniDV cameras, namely an XL1 and an XL2 and headed for the Mid East. The XL2 can be had for about $3,500. While that isn't chicken feed, the couple that made this film probably would have spent more on a pro camera than they spent on the entire movie otherwise. They edited the film on an Apple G4 Powerbook and a Power Mac along with a Sony video deck. In fact, they did a significant portion of the editing in the field at the palace.

I first heard about this film while browsing through apple.com in the "pro" section where they have interviews and articles about people who use Macs to do whatever. Photography, print design or in this case, making a movie.

It's really amazing when you think about what is offered now in the computing world. Major motion pictures (i.e. Sky Captain, Intolerable Cruelty) are being made on computers that you and I can purchase for $2,000 and are being produced with software that can be had for about $1,200. And that's just if you feel like you need to go high tech. I've made a couple of DVDs already with just my $600 Mac mini and Digital 8 video footage and photos.

The software I use is able to take digital video and edit it with some pretty professional results and it was just updated to handle HD video even though no DVD player can play it yet. There is no degradation of the footage so it comes out looking just as good as the footage on high dollar machines. With the exception of the fact that the software I use can be had for about $79 plus shipping or free in my case since it came with the computer.

Ridiculous ain't it.