Love Fest = Horror Fest

[Charlie Anderson]

As I sit here waiting for my film to compress, I figure I would share the horrors of Love Fest for me.

I'm no stranger to deadlines, in fact I do quite well under pressure, however my schedule this time around was friggin insane. I have 45 minutes until the deadline, I JUST put in my music and made the final cut. This week has been hell for me and I'll give a bit of insight as to what went on:

Thursday

So I get a text from the editor saying the cut was finished. Sweet! I got to pick it up after work and my jaw drops...the film is barely cut together...my heart sank because I knew what was coming up this weekend and I would have absolutely no time to devote to this project once 5pm on Friday hit...so I prepared myself for Friday.

Friday

I literally spend every single second at work editing that I could. I told my boss that I had a deadline to meet for a film festival and he gave me the go ahead to have a light work day (I showed him what I was doing and he was impressed so he said yeah (BTW 39 minutes left until the deadline)). I finished a rough cut, went home, took it to a friend to get another opinion about it and then finished the cut in another 2 hours or so. (side note i just hit squesse on Sorenson, says I have 25:37 to go...talk about cutting it close...now I have 23 minutes to go and it says I have 17:04 to go...wow). It was one of my best friend's birthdays on Friday so I had to go out and this weekend I was shooting 2 music videos and a commercial...oh joy.

Saturday

Friday night ended around 2am and so I had to be on set at 10am. We didn't actually shoot but we did extensive camera tests and other tests until 3:30pm, to which we were able to get the cut to the composer. At 6pm I was shooting a music video for Fairgreen which lasted until 2am.

Sunday

I had to be on set at 9am for a music video for Of Broken(the performance part), which was 45 minutes away from me and I had to dump footage from 2 firestores the night before...so I got around 4 maybe 5 hours of sleep that day. Not only that but I had to get a few pickup shots of Fairgreen's video after we were done shooting this new music video for Of Broken. We shot at an abandoned mental hospital in crownsville md until 7pm, which I then had to drive an hour away to finish the Fairgreen shoot. Note that I still did not have any titles, nor a camera in my film at this point nor did I have any form of music what so ever. I ended up taking a 20 minute break to literally throw a title sequence together and then I called my composer around 10pm asking where the music was...he was watching the Grammy's (I think that's what was on, something like that). WTF!!!! He asked me if he could get it to me tomorrow and I said I needed it in 2 hours.

I finished the titles, we wrapped around 1am and I get a phone call from the composer around 12:45am saying his sound card won't recognize his midi device and can't get the song to me...I tell him to keep trying. Well fortune has it that I get a phone call at 1:30am saying that he's finished the song and was going to email it to me...but the internet is down due to high gusts of winds here in Maryland. So he says I can either get it tomorrow or drive 45 mins away to get it...notice it's 1:30am (BTW 15 mins on deadline and I have 10 mins left on the compression). I call my buddy who lives halfway in between and I convince him to get the cd from the composer who told me he would jsut leave a cd in his mailbox and that I would meet him back at his house. Well I get to my buddy's house (actually he's my business partner) and I drive the speed limit back home because If I got pulled over it was game over.

So I get home, quickly edit the song together, export it through FCP, throw it into Sorenson Squeeze and here I am with 7 minutes left on the compression and 12 minutes left to upload it...this is getting down to the wire.

So yeah, that's my horror story. OH and I have work at 7am tomorrow, looks like I'm just getting a good nights nap :)

Feel free to post any horror stories you have of this oh so fun festival! Can't wait til next year (an dmy god this feels like a 48 hour film festival at this point).

[Charlie Anderson]

HAHAHAHA oh I forgot to change the resolution...oops oh well it's a bit small :)

[Charlie Anderson]

Oh F*** I had an internal error when I finished uploading at 2:59am...I really hope that doesn't screw me over...grr that's gay

[Simon Höfer]

So, did you make it?

[Jason Ramsey]

he made it.... as far as I can tell.

later,
Jason

[Rodney V. Smith]

Way to go dude. cutting it close, but you made it. Your composer needs to be shot slowly... with a glue gun.

[Charlie Anderson]

I'm definitely thinking the next film needs to be SleepFest...person to get the most sleep wins

[smashedburrito]

hahah wow man that sounded like a heck of a weekend.

[Rodney V. Smith]

actually I almost had a horror story on my hands on SATURDAY NIGHT. I was doing the final render in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and when I clicked to play, i got an "adobe primeirer internal error" everytime i clicked.

Ok, fine, I'll just restart Premiere... did that, and the same thing happened, so I roll my eyes and say, fine time to reboot windows.

Bad mistake. I reboted windows, selected my partition as always.. only to get a BLACK SCREEN with the words "Windows cannot load, file missing"

THis is the point where I freaked out. After all, my entire movie there on that computer. Sure the edit files and anythign to do with it was on my External Harddrive, and I had another computer... but the catch was that I didn't have Premiere Pro CS3 installed on the other computer. Only CS2, adn the files are not backwards compatible.

I finally calmed down and realized that I had another windows partition on another drive, which I hadn't used in months... but had premiere CS3 installed.
So I loaded that instead and managed to finish the edit....

not as horrific as your story of course, but extremely worrying just the same.. especially at 4:00 AM on sunday.

[Gohanto]

It kinda seems like music holds everyone to the deadline more than anything. No matter when you finish editing, everyone seems to give composures right up to the last minute work-time. That way my case at least.

Anyone else feel the same?

[Rodney V. Smith]

Well the music needs to be just right.. and sometimes the composer misses a few cues. my composer was skeptical of a request I had made for a particular cue, but when he tried it, he agreed that it worked. It was really just building the relationship between two strangers and trusting each other to do a good job. These days, I'm just glad we can work with people hundreds of miles away, thanks to the internet, and get some solid talent onboard wth post-production.

[Matty_g]

Two days before the shoot my location called and said we couldn't shoot there anymore.

[Charlie Anderson]

Two days before the shoot my location called and said we couldn't shoot there anymore.
Panic management kicked in right about then eh?

[Mark Harris]

I re-wrote one scene to avoid having to get permits. Well, just re-staged it, really, but I did not have the money for the insurance, and the scene was such that it would have taken too much set-up to run and gun, so...I think that's about the worst thing that happened.

Oh yeah, and I broke an SGPro on set...

[Rodney V. Smith]

ow!!

[Matty_g]

Note to self:
Don't let Mark Harris around your sgpro.

[Mark Harris]

Well I don't know if it was actually my fault and it's not actually broken. When I read up on the SGPro forums, it seemed like a problem others had encountered with the tube getting stuck and not turning. That's what happened on this one. I still shot with it by just screwing the whole thing on the camera and then sliding the rails through. Works fine. But that frickin' tube...

[Jason Ramsey]

Ouch.....

I broke my actors souls.

Later,
Jason

[Rodney V. Smith]

i only had one actor so I couldn;t break his soul.. maybe next film....

[Kegan]

I had an actress bail the morning of and thought it'd be okay, as the part was small. Finding a replacement proved easy enough...finding a replacement that could actually show emotion? Complete failure.

-Kegan

[Zak Forsman]

I hope she doesn't come in here and read that. And I hope you don't actually blame her for it.

[Jason Ramsey]

I blame Zak for any problems with my film. Your signature is a real downer for my self-esteem, man :)

Later,
Jason

[Zak Forsman]

I f*cking love you, Jason.

[mikkowilson]

I f*cking love you, Jason.


Oh sh-t, here we go. :eek:


Get a room guys.


- Mikko

[Kegan]

Zak, it was just a bit of an inside joke during production and not saying she was a complete failure or anything. My casting another actress was a complete failure. One would think it was the actress' fault who bailed, but she had a family member in the hospital and it was urgent. In a situation like that, no one can really be blamed.

We thanked the lady profusely for even volunteering her time for the part.

-Kegan

[pmark23]

Almost the entire crew failed to show. I had to DP and Direct, which I hadn't planned on doing (and hopefully won't be doing again!)