Editing

I could sucker punch technology right in the face at this moment. Let me tell you a cute little story of our incredible project that had so much time, planning, creativity, and effort turned into... well, a blank, white wall of nothing but a little blue spinning circle on my moniter. So, as you might have read in previous blog posts, just how excited I am... I was, for this film. Our team collaborted to come up with a great story line, we storyboarded shots well, found the perfect actor, and had great ethusiasm and work ethic for this project. Filming went off without a glich other than a few minor scheduling conflicts, tripods in the backgrounds of scenes, falling down the stairs once or twice, forgetting to turn the camera off, or back on, etc. When we watched all of the footage we had gather, we were all really pleased with the way our vision had translated to film, or at least I know I was. We knew with the right editing, it could be quite a little film. Brian and I were ready to get working right after spring break, as we were the first group finished with our footage. The only thing that stood in our way of achieving our vision of taking the labors of our team and translating them beautifully into a cinematic masterpiece was digitizing.


Oh, digitizing. I curse the day you were born... er, invented? So, for a month straight, that is the week we got from spring break to this past Thursday, we have been trying to digitize our footage so we can get to work and have our project finished before dreaded finals week. Well, guess what this week is, oh, just finals week-- the most feared week of any undergrad that sneaks up at the end of every semester. The week when you spend more time in Club Torreyson than you do your own room, you have not slept or showered in a time period that most would probably consider inappropriate, and you wish more than anything someone would invent a way to intervienously infuse your bloodstream with Starbucks. But, back on topic, it seemed as though every week when we would try to digitize, either other teams had the cameras, or a cord was missing, or Eric was missing, or something happened, or rather didn't happen to make our film digitized. SO finally, Last thursday, Eric spent forever digitizing our footage, because of course ours would have problems and be difficult after having such smooth sailing up until this point. ANyway, we got the footage, Brian edited it, and we found that there were roughly ten minutes worth of footage missing-- pretty vital footage such as our opening shot. Eric helped us out and got us the footage at midnight on Tuesday night.

Through a series of unfortunate events, I ended up becoming the editor for our film. Though I was on the irritated side that I had to stay up all night the night before working on it when I still had a final the next day and hadn't slept more than six hours this week, I actually enjoyed myself. I really liked the editing process, until I was going on about hour ten of editing when my computer started to go haywire! It had been slow all night and would freeze every ten minutes or so, and I would have to either just wait it out or restart it altogether, but about 5:00 this morning it stopped. Oh no, it didn't stop freezing up. It was kind enough to crash my computer, corrupting all of the film files, andrefusing to even play back the progress I had made thus far. Yes, yes. Twelve hours of editing (middle of the night editing, at that) down the virtual drain. Really? Really AVS, you want to quit on me when I am so close to finishing a project that my team and I have working on for about two months now? You are just such a sweetheart. I appreciate all of your cooperation. So... after numerous desperate attempts at salvaging anything we could, we salaged... nothing. Nothing. Wait, in case you just missed it, I said nothing. We have nothing to show for our work this semester other than our thoughts in these blogs. Oh, there's technology again for you. Let me guess, this blog would save or post either. That would be just my luck today, huh?