Boring Monkey

So, it's in the can. We have wrapped up principal photography on That Thing. Heh, always wanted to say that, corny as it is. Over a year and a half since we began, stretching out fourteen actual shooting days over that time. Though that's not including the two canceled shoots due to bad weather. Twenty four tapes are sitting on my shelf, each with almost an hour's worth of stuff. So it's done.

It really didn't really kick in for a few days. Saturday was the last shoot, and it was so cold. Of course some crazy hyped up storm was making its way towards the east coast on the day we were trying to wrap this up. We were well below freezing, and while that doesn't phase me much since I actually enjoy the cold weather, I always forget that others aren't so tolerant of low temperatures. Definitely slowed us down, as trying to memorize lines while shivering was more difficult than anticipated. The chase scene helped to get the blood pumping, but by the end of the day we were still half an hour behind, a bad thing when you're racing against a sun covered by clouds. But after a long day, it got done.

I proceeded to sleep for about sixteen hours. Then I got up and did nothing much to celebrate, just wandered around the Hudson shore on the west side of Manhattan, with nothing but fresh white snow on the ground for as far as the eye can see. Since then I've captured the rest of the footage and slapped together a quick trailer, and only now am I bugging out over finally finishing this movie. Maybe it's the whole seeing a year and a half of your life flash by in about sixty seconds that does that.
On a side note, there's something very enjoyable about cutting a trailer. I don't think there's much else in terms of video that's more... purely visual than piecing together a trailer. You got twenty something hours of raw footage and you have to find these tiny snippets of emotion that say just enough, and find order amongst this chaos. Every frame really counts, since in a minute you only get to have a little over a thousand of them, after titles and such. Cut one frame too many, and the shot becomes garbage, saying nothing and instead only being. Not to mention the goal is to grab someone's attention, gotta come up with something out there to do that nowadays.

Anyway, yeah, over the course of editing the trailer and afterwards, I think I've watched those sixty seconds at least fifty times by now.  Like I said, I'm flipping out. It's actually done. It's all there, I somehow got all these people to do this? And I created this thing out of nothing, and... yeah. I'm just glad to have it done. Too often I start something and never finish, but here it is.

I'll start editing for real next week, so much work ahead. But the hard part's over.