Hollywood and Vegas
It may not be worthy of Hollywood, but it is a Hollywood story; an independent director struggling to make his first film is left alone to edit the picture. Hitting roadblock after roadblock, he turns to a band of strangers who give him the knowledge and confidence to finish the film, which goes on to win numerous awards.
Stan Harrington, an actor, writer, and director based at the Stella Adler Theatre in Los Angeles, was that struggling filmmaker. With a budget of just $5,000, he wrote and directed his first feature, Bred in the Bone. He also found himself laboring to edit the film alone. "I'm e-mail challenged," says Harrington. "I think that's one of the reasons that [Vegas] is a great product, because if you knew just how averse I was to computers you'd think wow, it's a miracle that this thing was even made, let alone made relatively well."
Using a borrowed computer loaded with Vegas® software, Harrington began editing the footage he shot every night after the theatre closed at 11 p.m. "What really made the thing easy is that even though you've got a thousand different functions you can use, to put something on a timeline is just dragging and dropping. You can see it instantly, you don't have to render each shot as you do it; you don't have to render until the end of the actual product. You just see it instantly. That was the big thing that made it so easy."
For all those people who have a passion to do this to think that here's a guy who knows nothing about computers who put together a film and when he got stuck he had the support from Sony to be able to 
Stan Harrington
As a novice editor and admitted technophobe, Harrington occasionally ran into roadblocks as he edited Bred in the Bone. After some initial hesitation about using a forum, he turned to the Vegas user forum for help.
"The forum really made the difference. In many ways it's what turned me on to a lot of stuff. When I got stuck I didn't want to go to the forums because my experience with forums … when you put in a question it could take days for someone to answer you. So frustrating. I buckled one day and went to the forum and I put in the question thinking that this would never work and just out of curiosity I refreshed five minutes later and there was an answer. Through that, I got addicted to it, in the sense that if there was a problem I'd look on it, but I'd also check it every day because so many people had so many things to say and there were so many links that I found such as the VASST web site. So for me, it was the forum that introduced me to a whole world of Sony, not just Sony but all the peripherals and all the people that are on the side. The amount of people that are dedicated to Sony just blew me away."
The whole Sony Creative Software web site is really what makes
Stan Harrington
Harrington began submitting Bred in the Bone to film festivals. To date, the film has garnered several awards: the audience choice for Best Feature at the Foundation for the Advancement of Independent Films held at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, and winner of Best Actress (Blythe Metz), Best Screenplay (Stan Harrington), and Grand Prize Best in Show at the Action on Film Festival in Long Beach, California.
Harrington is not resting on his laurels. The Craving Heart, the new film produced by Harrington's own production company, Xristos Productions (named for his late father), premiered at the Action on Film Festival in July 2006. The Craving Heart was nominated for seven awards including Best Picture. While the Best Picture award eluded Stan and his crew, they did come away from the event with four big wins: Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. The film stars Golden Globe Winner John Saxon as well as Adrian Zmed (Grease 2, T.J. Hooker) and Rick Peters (Aquaman, Veronica Mars). The Craving Heart was shot using a Sony® HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder.
For more information about Stan Harrington, his films and current projects, please visit www.xristosproductions.com.
