I realize it’s been a while since I reported any new happenings on the film. There are a few reasons. The reason for the last few weeks was that I was having problems logging in, but after enough whining and complaining, it’s all good. The biggest reason for the lengthy lapse in updates is the sad fact that for quite a while there wasn’t any “news” to report on. The film had reached a wall of sorts. It was the financial wall. In short, we have managed to break through that wall with the help of several generous individuals. We will now be able to have the sound edit, sound mix, color correction and mastering done!!!
Read on if you want all the sorted details of the last few difficult months of our lives.
Luci and I needed to work as much as we could to make ends meet and therefore unable to dedicate little, if any, time toward finishing the film. But we weren't able to work so much where we could actually get ahead enough to pay for the thousands of necessary finishing dollars ourselves. We applied for several finishing funds from assorted organizations and outlets and were rejected by a few and are waiting to hear back from the others. From those we did hear back from, we were encouraged to resubmit future cuts and/or re-apply. So not a total loss.
While we were working to get funds for both living and finishing, our film sat idle in the computer. Luci and I had reached the difficult decision to just finish the film to best of our abilities and nt wait for the fiancial windfall needed to enlist professional help. Then, as if on cue, an email pops into my inbox enquiring about the needs of the film and one week later, we received a very generous donation from an amazing couple who like to provide financial support to organizations they deem worthy. This year, they chose our film.
We immediately started looking into the cut again to realize exactly how much work was left to do and wouldn’t you know it, our big LaCie drive starts acting up AGAIN (see earlier BLOG). Sometimes it would work and other times it’s totally inaccessible. At best, it was inconsistent and “hinky” making all work on the film slow going and pretty much futile. So, yet again, we played the troubleshooting game with our ageing computer and came to the conclusion that the drive has finally died and we’ll need to replace it. I went out and bought another 500 gig external drive to copy our 300 gigs of media onto. This time I chose Maxtor. We have 2 other drives from them and have had zero problems. Everyone I talk to about the problems with the LaCie drive are surprised and proudly report that they’ve never had any problems with theirs. LaCie told me that they have a 1% failure rate. Say hello to the 1%. I managed to copy over the data over the course of a week. In the meantime, for reason that are too lengthy to get into, we tried a different power supply for the LaCie drive and voila, it works like a charm, er, I mean, like it’s supposed to. So now we have an extra 500 gig drive.
Our great friend, amazing sound editor and morale boosting friend, Ruth Hernandez, spent a day with us “specing” the film for sound effects and making general sound notes for us. She also did some variations of our music to use in different places throughout the film. So at last, we have been putting all the final touches we can on it before we put it into the capable hands of our sound designer, Tom Lino and then the color correctionist who is yet to be determined.
Things that have happened along the way:
Obviously from my earlier posts, you can see that we rescued an injured cat. He has recovered rather nicely and walks and runs and fights with our other cats. We thought there was good news when we found his owners, but it’s never that easy. Apparently they didn’t do much looking for him when he went missing, thought he had died and balked at helping us pay the vet bill. He’s still hanging out with us, but we are looking for a home for him. He’s about 3-4 years old, very outgoing and has a little limp.
I tried my hand at regaining my youth by building a skate ramp with a neighbor friend and was enjoying weekend sessions on Baltic Street until I fell and tore my left meniscus in my left knee. There goes my skate life. There may be some arthroscopic surgery in my near future.
I have done a couple of video jobs for our friends Jeff and Adam’s company, BrightRED Pictures. They hired me to interview people on the streets of NYC about different aspects of their faith and edit it all together for the website, Beliefnet.com. Click through them, they’re kinda’ cool. Through these projects, I was able to learn Final Cut Pro. Being a PC loyalist for so long, I have to say I am VERY impressed with the Mac world. FCP is like a nice marriage between Avid and Premiere. It does, however, allow you to be very sloppy and therefore I’ve noticed a few nasty little editing habits creeping in, but overall, I’m convinced.
After all our tech problems and frustrations I have decided that my next computer purchase will be a Mac. So bring on the "I told you so's!!"
