the rest of the story

I've been meaning to chronicle these ups and downs as they happened, but haven't had a chance thus far. So: I thought I was all good and such with my film once I had turned it in the first time, but it was not so! I managed to get my film back on the same day as the rough cut screening, and I ran in to chop it up a bit and make it more presentable, but the middle section of the film turned out to be totally blank! The beginning and end were there, but there was a chunk in the middle that was whited out (though not entirely; the black frames of the Oxberry were still there, just nothing in them).



I'm still not sure what I did that screwed it up, but it was a pretty sad time....until I was informed by the lovely people of AFCOOP that I could reshoot! This was wonderful news, as I had been trying to resign myself to the idea that after all that work I didn't have a film. Later that week I went in and reshot -- Martha sent the film out right away and it came back early the next week. Looking at that reshot film almost gave me a heart attack -- it would fade to black and my heart would start racing before remembering that there was an intentional fade-out that was supposed to be there. This second time round it all turned out fine, fortunately. Whatever it was that happened the first time didn't repeat itself.



I edited up my second take (or rather, spliced together the part that turned out the first time with the stuff I had to redo), and recorded some sounds at home. I ended up mixing the sounds with a combination of Audacity and Premiere (due to Audacity not being able to import video; I would create a certain sound by layering and cutting in Audacity and then drop that into Premiere and do a bit more playing around). The delay because of reshooting did mean that I had missed the audio deadline, but Natalie was kind enough to come in and dump my audio tracks to mag stock for me. After that the audio edits and sync went really well and I somehow had everything in on time!

So there you have the belated story of the rest of my technical problems. I am seriously so grateful to AFCOOP and all the people who helped me out because without their patience, understanding, deadline flexibility and last-minute assistance, I wouldn't have a film.