29.03.10

We went in early today to finish of our piece, we were pretty excited and everything has gone quite smoothly so far, until today. All we had to do we re-watch the film just to make sure everything was perfect, apply our chosen colour filter to all the clips and insert credits. I don't know what we did to deserve it, but today everything that went wrong, went wrong. We started with the colouration and as we had already chosen the filter levels, only had to copy attributes to all. However it was not this easy as the clip that Olle showed us how to chance the colour on for some reason saved with this new colouration and would not blend with the rest of the piece. The only way we could change it was to delete and re-cut from the original footage which then made the timeline jump around and the music was out of sync, then for some reason any "flopping" we did un-did itself and the colouration kept disappearing. THEN for no reason at all, gaps started appearing between clips and little snippets copying next to the original scene, it was very stressful so close to the deadline and especially as we love what we've done and the thought of losing it all now was horrendous!! After several hours of sorting this problem out, then FCP was telling us the clips were in offline mode, but it still played the video??? We were so confused and panicking!! I went upstairs several times to find help but Dennis said Olle wasn't here, Robbie didn't know what to do about it and the dungeon guys were teaching. In the end we decided to get it all sorted bar the offline mode thing-The clips all went read so we couldn't even see what they were- and craft our press release.

For our Press Release we wanted to use a still from the film and also use the clip as the credits. We went for a close up of the tv and hands and inserted the text into the screen showing white noise. Me and Grace were practically brain dead after the mornings events and the press release took us about an hour to write, again it was horrific...we are good at writing but computers really numb my brain!! We eventually came up with something simple and punchy, anything to flowery or pretentious wouldn't fit our film or designer.

A nice man from the dungeon eventually came to our aide and he couldn't work out why it was reading our files as offline, apparently it was just a program malfunction?? a very scary one. When all was safe we inserted the same image we use for the press release as the backdrop for our title. Like the press release we pasted the title and definition into the screen as it flickers. Most people have got scrolling credits but we thought it was a bit cheesy and drawn out for our very short film so opted for a simple black screen with few details. The last scene is quite prominent in our piece and ridiculous credits would have lost its dramatic effect.

We then burned our film to disc, and realised we had bought a cd instead of dvd-tut tut. So will have to re-burn a dvd tomorrow. It was so good to finally get the everything tarted up and ready to be shown! I still can't believe that we made a film, from scratch. Me and grace literally did everything for our shoot, and did all the editing together as well. We have shared the same vision and ideas since the beginning and have had quite a smooth sailing on the creative front but a bit of trouble on the technical side and we are both crap at computers and I'm especially poor at dealing with macs. When we left Uni it felt so weird to have all these weeks work on a little disk, but also quite a relief that everything had worked out according to plan.