Free at last!

After a month of work, and procrastination of said work, it is finished. My movie is done. Mostly.
I had 90% of the filming done by last Sunday. The last 10% consisted of music scenes (the movie soundtrack includes rock, punk, folk, classical and rap music, all original compositions) and a scene involving my ex-roomy Chris. He had the nerve to get married last week and I had to wait for him to get back from his honeymoon to film. That we did, at 7 in the morning. Unfortunately for us it was snowing, so I had to some last minute adjustments to get the scene to work correctly indoors. But filming was finally complete Thursday morning at 8. I had 2.5 hours of footage and 36 hours to finish my movie.

I started editing on Monday. As with my previous 2 movies, the process was not as simple as it should have been. The hard drive I rented on Monday became unreadable on Wednesday, meaning I had no access to my work (I had done about 5 hours of work at that point.) It miraculously began working again on Thursday, meaning I got 5 hours of work back, but I was now a day behind. To make up for this I worked at a special multimedia computer in the library for 14 hours on Thursday, the first 12 being consecutive. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for that long before in my life. But by midnight Thursday I had finished all the editing and started burning my movie (a process that takes about 2.5 hours.)

I came to the lab Friday morning to find the computer frozen. I still had until 7 to get it done (so it could be shown at the ward movie night) so didn’t worry too much. I started burning another DVD and went to class. I came back at noon and found the computer again frozen. I managed to switch to another computer (they are usually scheduled several days in advance and you have to have reservations) and started it burning. By 3 I had a copy burned and tried watching it on a DVD player. Nothing. I simplified the menu system I was using for the DVD screen and started burning another disk before heading to work. I returned after 6 and the DVD was just finishing. By 6:20 I had my DVD in hand with 40 whole minutes to spare before the festival.

I’d say the reactions were quite positive. I got a lot of laughs throughout the film, though sometimes they were at jokes that I thought were minor, where some major jokes didn’t get much attention. The only complaint I got was that it was too long. I agree that it didn’t match the other movies at the show (they averaged 10 minutes, whereas mine was nearly 40) but I really couldn’t do this movie in much less time. But to but to counter the occasional length complaints, I had a lot of people that wanted copies, which is always nice.

So I had a great time, but am glad that it’s done. And now I have a trilogy! I’m guessing that med school will kill my filmmaking aspirations, but maybe those med students are just fooling us all and actually have a ton of free time.

Song of the moment: “Atonal Swicket Symphony Ending in F” by Nate Jackson