Video Production

As I am writing this, I am sitting in the video lab working on my final project for video production. You may wonder why I have time to write this. Its simple: It takes forever to convert video files, even on the school's mac-pros. While this is frustrating, this is far from being the worst snag in my attempt to get a workable version of the project by Saturday afternoon.

As a warning, this might sound like complaining, so if you don't want to hear it, don't bother reading this. but I DO have a point at the end... hopefully.

Video production can be fun. It is amazing to see your hard work up on scene, and the feeling you get from watching people enjoy what you have done is wonderful. But when deadlines com sailing toward you and things beyond your control keep happening, it can be incredibly stressful. From unreliable cast and crew (mostly cast, in my case, and not the ones that ended up being in the film) to unforeseeable equipment malfunctions (mic picking up radio waves? what the hell...), productions always take longer than you expect, and no matter how far ahead you plan it will always be close. For example, I was delayed for three weeks by cast problems before I could even shoot, and then lost one day of shoot to technical problems and most another to a schedule conflict.

So what can be learned from this? What can be done. Unfortunately this experience has only taught me that things WILL go wrong, and that you have to be prepared to deal with them. I have yet to learn how to avoid these problems, most of which, admittedly, could have been probably solved if we had had a few thousand dollars to spend on paid actors and rented locations, which would have most likely proven a lot more reliable.

That said, I would probably have ended up wit ha whole new set of problems, which I have been assured is the nature of the business.

Working on projects like the one I am working on give you a new sense of respect for those who work on great movies, like Letters From Iwo Jima, which I wrote about this morning. On a project of that scale, its hard to imagine the kinds of things that the director had to deal with. In their case, as with most commercial films, it turned out so well that it's impossible to believe that the production didn't go smoothly (And I can assure you, it probably didn't).

I only hope that my project will give such an impression when (and if) I am able to complete it.