Award-winning young filmmaker, Ben Kadie—now 13—grew up playing with video editing software and working on projects with his father. By age 12, he and a friend launched their own film production company, “Slugco Inc.” and had picked up multiple awards, including twice winning the Seattle Times Three-Minute Masterpiece Youth Award. His films have screened at the Seattle International Film Festival and at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth. At these festivals he has often been the youngest filmmaker.
Switching to VEGAS
After upgrading from an older program called ULead, Kadie became hooked on VEGAS. “VEGAS was just the next step up with editing,” says Kadie. “I found that VEGAS is just so much quicker to use.”
Ben made “A Friendly Game” with his school friend Dylan Forbes. “A Friendly Game” was filmed in HD and edited in the HD-ready VEGAS. But “A Friendly Game” wasn’t Kadie’s first editing project as a VEGAS producer.
“I used it on a 24-minute movie I made called ‘009’ — it is a James Bond spoof,” he explains. He learned the ins and outs of VEGAS while working on that film. The film “009” stars Kadie and his friend Noah Hirsch. David Hovel composed the score using ACID Pro.
Editing in VEGAS
The “Friendly Game” project took just four days to edit. “I really like VEGAS,” says Kadie. “There are just so many shortcuts and it’s much quicker to use. And you can edit the film while you watch it in real time.”
Kadie edited both “009” and “A Friendly Game” on a single-processor eMachine with an external drive, but recently upgraded to a quad-processor Dell with 3GB of memory for the work he is doing on his next film.
There are just so many shortcuts and it’s much quicker to use. And you can edit the film while you watch it in real time. – Ben Kadie
Built-in Special Effects
Kadie used the special effects included in VEGAS to bring his film to life. “For ‘A Friendly Game,’ I used Green Screen for the long jumps and those sorts of things, and I used Mask to cut out a tennis ball that I’d hung from a string,” he explains. “To animate the ball I used VEGAS’ ‘Event Pan/Crop.’ That way, we didn’t actually have to hit a tennis ball that well.”
Kadie also used the “Veg-within-Veg” feature in VEGAS to create “A Friendly Game” in layers. At times, Kadie had three levels of projects in the film. Also, in “009,” he edited in “chapters” as a “Veg” and then put them together using “Veg-within-Veg” to create a full movie. This way, he could keep the film at full quality and still view changes to the movie on the fly.
Up and Coming Projects
After his latest win, Kadie is penning and in production on a new film he describes as a murder mystery set in Egypt 100 years ago called, “Murder at the Pharaoh’s Grave.” Over the summer, he also enjoyed a contest prize: a two-week teen film class at the Seattle Film Institute.
