Hobbling Towards The Home Stretch

Been a while. Tired, too tired to sit down and type nonsense when I could be spending the time trying to gather a few scant moments of sleep. If I was lucky I might have gotten four hours of rest any given night in the last two weeks. Some of it spent working on that thing, but lots of other work as well. Obviously missed the deadline for that other festival, bit of a bummer. Not to make excuses, not like anyone is reading this anyway, but it just seems as of late that I've had too many days that were 'One of those days', if you catch what I'm saying. Lots of shit went wrong at inopportune times.

Had a pair of headphones die out on me yesterday. Not the most egregious case of bad luck or whatever you want to call it, but I think it's one that nicely exemplifies the rotten time I'm having. For whatever reason the right side crapped out on me. They weren't a fancy pair or anything, I'm not going to shed a tear over thirty dollars worth of sound that lasted almost a year. But it happened in the morning, on the way to work. Too late for me to go back home and grab another pair, if I was to listen to anything I had to do so through only the left ear. You can't really enjoy music that way, or at least I can't. I'm easily distracted by the fact that I'm only hearing half the music. This music should be so much better, now it's just kinda hobbling about.

Constant compromises needed to have been made in the last few weeks in regards to that thing. Trying to do everything I had to do in a week was unrealistic at best. Assuming I would be able to work sixteen hours a day and everything worked it was still a stretch to think I could make that HBO Latino Film Fest deadline. Neither happened, so the deadline was missed. The plan was to spend the days using After Effects on a computer at a friends place to finish the small number of effects and do the color grading there. The computer I'm typing this on isn't suitable for the editing of HD video so said friend was gracious enough to allow me to work on it in his basement. The problems begin to arise when I realized that he no longer has a copy of After Effects newer than 7.0. The version he did have must have been at least six years old, too old to take advantage of various scripts and plug-ins I had to streamline the work I was planning to do. Not good. After a bit of panicking, the decision was made to fuck it, just do everything in Final Cut. Also an old version, old enough to not include Color. So a lot of the following two or three weeks were spent grinding out an attempt to do these otherwise simple effects in a very tedious fashion. Not fun at all.

It has taken way longer than I thought it would. And even still, I'm not pleased with the results. I'm wasting so much energy and brain cells on a lot of work I'm probably going to throw away when I have some actual free time over the summer to start that phase of post production over. However, more festival deadlines approach, so I gotta get something presentable done. Many late nights, many cans of Red Bull and bags of shitty fast food to sustain myself through those long days and nights. It ceased to be fun a while back.

It's like those headphones, you're just in the mood to crank up the volume and simply enjoy some good music, but that busted driver in the right earcup won't let you. It grates on the nerves, wears down whatever morale you build up. You know, sometimes you get into that groove, and that's when you're at your most productive. And then sometimes something will pull that needle across the turntable and that kills the mood. I'm telling ya, yesterday was just 'One of those days'. Sleep late, wake early, headphones die, lots of work, shitty food, and then you get to finally sit down and start cranking away at that movie. Then the record gets scratched, your computer decides to cease functioning. Just up and shut itself off at two in the am, and pressing the power button repeatedly does jack shit. Kinda sucks. You just don't expect an expensive machine like that to just up and blow itself up like that. Hope my friend still has his warranty.

Lousy way to end the night. Didn't lose much work since I habitually save often nowadays, but that just harshed my mellow. Was getting close having that thing resemble something complete. And now I gotta find another computer to work with. And buy another pair of headphones.