How much time have you spent...

Hawk Teflon

Hawk Teflon

Veteran
What is the longest amount of time you've spent on a project (hours wise) that got scrapped or never saw the light of day? Pretty sure it just happened here, and I'd just like to hear about someone else going through the same thing to help ease my sorrows.
 
Month of pre-production, 22 person crew, 26 hour day shoot, two street shutdowns, month post-production for a short, shut it down after we realized that it wasn't going to be as good as we wanted it to be [read: it kinda sucked]. *sadface
 
I guess that at least you gained some experience.......

Mattykins said:
Month of pre-production, 22 person crew, 26 hour day shoot, two street shutdowns, month post-production for a short, shut it down after we realized that it wasn't going to be as good as we wanted it to be [read: it kinda sucked]. *sadface
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26 hour day? Well that's your problem....

Being tired is the biggest factor in loss of quality on set. You just lose the motivation and the clarity you need.
 
I've still got CW11 swag around my house... from when a local "environmentalist" and I were supposed to do a TV show here in STL. It took me a while to see the reality of the situation, as investors kept backing out... and this guy kept me on the hook with promises of our agreed on minimum pay (which was always deferred, and is to this day).

We even shot with CW11 trucks and crew on a couple occasions... plus my nearly 30 tapes over the course of about 4 months.

AFAIK none of it has seen the light of day... which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. If ever there was a candidate for a teleprompter, this guy was it... I fed him lines through every shoot... and he struggled to improv anything. There were days where it took 30 minutes just to get a 1-2 line show intro.


And if that's not good enough for you... ask somebody about me... and lights. I've got YEARS lost in that... now that's a painful subject for me. Flolight has one of two prototypes... that I designed... and they showed it off at NAB last year. It's an LED Octagon with a hole in the middle of it... maybe you've seen it. This light wasn't even supposed to be available to them... The two prototypes were to go to me, and another DVXuser... for approval to begin offering them here.

*sniff*... ahh... well... so... how about your deal? :)
 
There was a fair amount of travel involved, thus the extra time. We were on set for maybe 18, it was probably closer to a 22 hour day.

*shrugs, I know where the production problems were. If we could have done it differently, we would have - trust me. We actually worked pretty efficiently that show, shot 15 pages that day. Our material wasn't that bad. That was several years ago.

We all make mistakes. Really, we tossed it because we couldn't get the digital effects up to par with the budget and time constraints we had, and some acting was a tad weak, so rather than continue on something that would end up being subpar, we killed it.

Happens to the best of us.
 
Mattykins said:
Month of pre-production, 22 person crew, 26 hour day shoot, two street shutdowns, month post-production for a short, shut it down after we realized that it wasn't going to be as good as we wanted it to be [read: it kinda sucked]. *sadface
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Couldn't you have waited for a few other people to throw in their stories before you trumped everyone Mattykins?
:)

Kinda hard to follow up that one....
 
Haha. Hey man, I like stories. There is rarely a time I can bring up that project. I take every chance I get. :)
 
Wow, yeah. I'm feeling better.

Two other guys and I sunk about 350-400 hours (total between the three of us) on a shoot that's spanned quite a while now as it keeps finding ways to become extended out more often than not. And we're only able to shoot early in the morning and late at night (it was promoting a place that was open 7 days a week from 9AM-7PM, so we had to shoot around them being open for lighting / audio /etc). We were directed by the on camera talent what to shoot, so we shot it. Finally finished editing it. Multiple disks. Well, his boss informed him that wasn't the direction he was wanting at all. Like ... at ALL. So, back to square one.
 
You guys are making me feel a bit better.

I shot a simple short film in 1 day in Oct 2008.
Post is over 2.5 years. Granted most of that time has been begging people to actually do the work they offered to do,
but the entire situation wore me out finally about a month ago and gave up.

Best part is we shot on a HF100 before dslr's really came into play to try to show people what these little cameras could do.
Well that time has obviously passed.
 
Somewhere between 200 and 300 hours doing CGI, if that counts. But usually between 100 & 200 hours get scrapped. Just the way it is.
 
Mattykins said:
Month of pre-production, 22 person crew, 26 hour day shoot, two street shutdowns, month post-production for a short, shut it down after we realized that it wasn't going to be as good as we wanted it to be [read: it kinda sucked]. *sadface
Click to expand...

Oh man!

I feel like that almost every day on shoot.
Damn camera won't move like you want them to, lights just fight against you when you want those Michael bay slash Tony Scott shots and getting the framing right is a nightmare.

These days I shoot as much as I can as fast as I can for as long as i can!

Your project must have bummed you out something fierce after so much prep.

Sorry man.
 
About a year, year and a half back we shot a $10 000 music video that we and the studios new would not get aired because they didn't like content in the song of the artist, but the (big in south africa) artist insisted, we had to go to a open mine site three times to get all the shots, build a whole stage rig there and a rig to drop the artist from the top of the rig to the stage. Everytime a safety briefing, everytime setting up big generators, all that. At least the stage was just one of the shoot days.

Yes it was a paying gig, but man, to make something that you know will not be aired because of a artist ego, ugh.

- derrick
 
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