It is what it is.

Guess I didn't get around to writing this 'till now, huh? So, the other week I got around to finishing the movie. Well, sorta finished, finished enough to fork over forty bucks and toss a disk of that thing in the mailbox, to a film festival whose last deadline was the day of. Such a long evening too, broke night, went nearly forty-eight hours without sleep to crank out something watchable. Most of that time was spent on audio, not nearly enough time though, hence why I'm not really finished. Frustrating two days too, I'm pretty sure I hit the breaking point with Final Cut, got to the point where making changes three layers worth of embedded sequences deep weren't registering on the final output, not to mention I had to hack the thing to five or so pieces so it would actually export without vomiting up 'out of memory' errors. But hey, it got finished, more or less. Hurray, I guess.

That Thing is a thing. It is what it is. It has become what it was meant to become, nothing more, not much less. It isn't anything but the thing that resulted from being the product of ink on paper that spread to a bunch of people which was then funneled into months of concentrated labor. It is what it is. Something I find myself saying with more regularity. It's such a meaningless statement, but one that somehow says just enough. I tend to stick that label on a lot of things I feel ambivalent about; I don't love it, but I got nothing against it either. It just is what it is.

It's a cop-out of a declaration, praise and insult all thrown into five words. Shouldn't be a surprise then that I lean on that crutch when describing that thing I made. It is what it is, a haphazardly thrown together flick that merely incurred costs of less than a grand in total. Peanuts for what is a feature length film. Try as I did, I couldn't elevate the apparent production value of the project beyond that much. But is that low budget aesthetic necessarily a bad thing? I don't know, it probably is. Probably just telling myself otherwise to ease the mind. I just keep telling myself that it is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

There's not much to do on it anymore. Once I'm done making the sound approach something near acceptable I'm putting the wraps on it. By the end of May I'd like to never touch that thing again, just live with it being whatever it is and move on to creating something new. No regrets, just putting an end to whatever would be a suitable word to describe the last few years.