Who Am I?

I am an avid runner and have been running since I was 15 years old. I began running low to medium distances while on my high school track team, running the 800 meter and 1600 meter races (I was a sub 5 miler and a 2 minute 800 runner). In addition to the track team, I also joined the cross country team. After high school I still wanted to run and decided to start doing road races. I have probably ran a couple hundred 5k races (16.29 PR)along with many 10k's as well. In 2009 I decided to step up my game and try to tackle my first marathon. I will be honest; the only reason I did this was because my father ran a few and I wanted to show him that I could do what he did. I trained poorly for my first one and regret it. If you are going to run a race, train like you want to win. I still continue to run marathons and other distances as well, and every race is a chance for me to better myself.
I started this blog to hopefully communicate with other runners and to shed any knowledge I may have about the sport that can help other runners. I believe running is the best sport and can be a great stress reliever. I encourage all runners to spread the word of our sport and show people why running is so good and why the community of runners has such great people. You can follow me on twitter @byrne1324 or find me on facebook- Shaun Byrne

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Break from Running for a Film

     Camera one ready, camera two, quiet on the set and action….I can’t tell you how many times I heard these words over the weekend. I was competing with a group of friends in a 48 hour film competition. Let me give you the rundown of how this exactly worked. Friday at 6:00 all the teams reported to Chatham University to find out all their details they would need to know. Teams were broken down into 4 different groups. Each group has about 15 teams or so in it. You then sent one person from your team on stage so they could draw what genre of film your team would be doing. You could have drawn any one of these.

 Comedy                               Dark Comedy                                        Drama
 Film Noir                            Film de Femme                                      Fish Out of water
 Horror                                 Musical or Western                                Road Movie
 Romance                             Sci Fi                                                      Silent Film
                          Thriller/Suspense                          Time Travel                                                                                                                        


       If you drew a genre that you didn’t like you had the option to put it back and take your chance with a wild card. Every group that put the original card back would all be given the same wild card category, and you were stuck with it no matter what. The wildcard given to those teams was Chase/Escape. My team decided beforehand that we would keep any category except Musical / Western or Silent Film. We figured those are the ones that the music would matter the most and our musician lives on the west coast and was making our music off of clips we would be sending to her throughout the filming day. One of the rules was all footage and music had to be original, unless you owned the rights to the music. We were hoping to get Drama, but wouldn’t mind getting Comedy or Dark Comedy. Lady luck must have been on our side that day because my cousin Chris drew Drama for us. Honestly any genre you drew was going to be hard because of what was given to all the teams next. Each team was given the same character (Victor Carr a human statue for his profession) a line of dialogue “I’m not at all surprised” and a prop (a ticket) that would have to be used at least once in the movie. So now not only are you trying to write a film that has to be 4-7 minutes long but you are writing it and trying to throw in the other stuff. I mean there really is no way to plan ahead for this. The most planning our team did was scout out some locations and have people on standby ready to get us access to any location we may need to get in Saturday morning. 

      We had one location that we really wanted to use because we figured it would be a game changer. A set that might actually get our film some attention. After receiving all our information my cousin Mike @mikesmithwriter went home to think up and write the story. I went over after getting something to eat. We ended up getting the story written, printed out and sent to all the crew around 1:00 am. I headed home because we were meeting at 5:15 am to head to the location to start shooting at 6:00 am. We spent about 3 hours at the first location before heading to the second location. Thank god we were only using 2 locations. We finished shooting all the footage around 5:30 pm. Our 2 camera men went to one of their houses to start uploading all the shoots into the computer so they could start the editing process. Most of us ended there to help as well. It was around 4 in the morning when they decided to call it a night. At 9:00 am most of us were back at it again. We finally wrapped everything up at 4:00 pm Sunday afternoon. All films had to be handed in between 5 and 7:30 pm at Chatham University. I read that out of 47 teams 35 teams were on time and 12 were late. Which means those 12 teams have already been disqualified for a chance to win. 

       Overall it was an awesome experience. We had a blast making the film and even though we got very little sleep and pretty much lived off of fast food for the weekend it was all worth it once we saw the final product. From the camera work to the acting to the music it all came together. I don’t know what are chances are of winning, but I like to think we have a great story with some great acting. Not to mention we hit all three things that were required by the competition.

      Friday night the 18th our group will have their films shown at the Hollywood Theatre in Dormont at 7:00. We are trying to get as many people as we know to come vote for our movie “Horizon”. Even though it is judged by real judges, you still have a chance to win an audience participation award. 

Here is our trailer for the film: I will post the full version once the competition is over!!!!!




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2 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 17, 2014 at 9:37 AM

    Wow! The trailer is awesome and looks so professionally done. I can't believe you did the whole thing in just one weekend. Sounds like it took a ton of work in general, plus having to work with all those constraints. I hope you win!

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