Woes of a Student Filmmaker

Rob Blake here once more:

Last week I was posting ECSTATIC comments about "The Death of Joe Britz." Pretty much orgasming over how this thing that started shaping in my head last December was coming true. All the acting is incredible, we are moving along right on schedule everything is going just the same... except for the editing.

The editing, which was going spectacularly next week hit a snag on Thursday. I ran out of memory on my lap top to keep editing. Of course, I did not have any more memory available. Thus, I decided to go to my capture scratch and delete clips I had already finished. If any of you are familiar with a Mac, you know you have to drag most things to the trash to delete them. So I did, and played the clips without any trouble, thus I emptied my trash. I had only done this with a few clips, in case problems would arrise.... and boy did they.

I went right away to opening up Final Cut Pro again and BAM! "11 Clips Are Now Offline." FUCK!!! What have I done?! I can't recover that! (If I can, please somebody tell me).

Truthfully, we only lost about a minute of stuff, not that bad. I mean, it could be a LOT worse. Most of it is Ray's stuff (sorry Ray), but I still haven't checked if I have it on any tapes, but I believe I taped over the first days stuff.

So after this disaster, I decided to go get an external harddrive. There goes 100 bucks down the drains. Last of my birthday money, and delving into some of my "Once on this Island" money. So I have it, and now I'm transferring all the files over.

Seriously, I used to wonder things like "Why did it take Sam Raimi 4 years to make The Evil Dead?" Now I know why. Re-shoots and re-editing and re-a bunch of other random shit.

I mean, it is hard enough being a student filmmaker. You can't pay for locations to shoot, so you are left trying to scour the city and friend's homes for the perfect locations (which we found in John's house). You can't pay actors so you better hope you know people in community theater willing to help out, which luckily I do (thank you Kyle), or your friends better be willing and wanting to be in a film. You can't pay for equipment, so you have to use handheld video cameras and tripods you bought from Target and to top it all off: Nobody gives a rats ass about what you do unless it is under 10 minutes. Seriously, there is no student film festival that have over 10 minute limit. Especially Joe Britz will be stuck at a very awkward running time of about an hour and 5 minutes (65 pages in the script = 65 pages of screen time). It isn't long enough to be a feature, but not short enough to be a short. So where does it fall? Well, from research, it is technically a feature, but seriously, how many hour long movies are out there? Not many.

I'm still in love with this project, and am working on it everynight, but god damn. It gets frustrating.