I know you all have been eagerly awaiting the release of my horse-related final project. So here it is, The Secret Life of Felix, the short film about Felix’s life as an event horse. Included in the film is an exclusive interview with the star himself!

I took all of the footage myself, using my iPhone’s camera. Well, there were a few scenes that my boyfriend Mike shot for me, because I was in the scene – but I directed him! The project ended up being sort of a mix of the two ideas I had to begin with: a day in the life of Felix, plus a mini-documentary about eventing and Felix’s experience with eventing. I included an interview portion to make the video more interesting and less documentary-ish. I really wanted to express Felix’s personality with this project, and I think the interview part best showcased it. Thanks for the advice, Professor Levine

As I mentioned in earlier posts, the thing I struggled with most was how I was going to do Felix’s voice. I ended up using the Female to Male instrument in GarageBand. I’m honestly still not happy with it – I hate listening to it, the voice just sounds like me with an awful head cold – but I think that it’s about as good as I could get, without bribing some dude to read lines for me! I used GarageBand to record the stuff, then Audacity to edit it. Can I just add that Audacity is WAYYYY easier to use than GarageBand? I kept getting irritated with GarageBand because it wasn’t as intuitive and simple as Audacity.

The clips that I used for illustrating the 3 phases of Eventing came from YouTube:

That was the one I used for the dressage video. I honestly can’t remember which videos I got the other two from…shame on me for not bookmarking them. But I am pretty sure that the cross country one is Phillip Dutton at the Head of the Lake at Rolex Kentucky, and the show jumping one is from Rolex as well, I think it’s William Fox-Pitt. I didn’t want the viewer to get bogged down with the minute details of eventing; I wanted to try to keep the attention of people who just love horses for their beauty and personality. That’s why I have a lot of shots of Felix just kind of standing there looking at the camera all cute.

I got the music from incompetech, I am not sure how to link to each specific song, but I can tell you that the two songs I used were “Happy Alley” and “Nothing is Broken,” in that order. I chose those because I wanted the music to be light and quick and upbeat, sort of like the music that goes with Hobbit scenes in Lord of the Rings. Felix is a very friendly and personable horse, so I wanted to music to reflect that.

My horse Felix is more than a pet, he is my partner and friend. I wanted my final project to center around him because honestly, I knew I wouldn’t be happy with another subject! And he made filming easy; he was a ham for the camera, and seemed to look right at me at all the right times. Because he is so friendly, I really wanted the viewer to get a sense of his personality, like I mentioned before. That’s why I wanted to try to tell the story from his perspective. While the video isn’t a story in the strict definition of the word, I think it’s a story in that Felix tells you about his life – and I think everyone’s life is a story! Even if it is a horse or a dog or a cat or a hamster. Hopefully as he grows older and achieves more goals there will be MUCH more to add to Felix’s story.

So here it is, I hope you enjoy it.