Blogs » The Life of a Filmmaker wanna be.

The Life of a Filmmaker wanna be.

• Posted by Xitsundzuxo Himina September 23, 2013 - 968 views

  Hi Student Filmmakers

  Another week has passed. Oh My God!!! This one was the most hectic one I tell you, I didn't think it would ever end. I know I chose this career path; Because of my passion for filmmaking, but the fact that there is no one pushing me to do this makes it easy for me to think of quitting.

  I am not a quitter though, or am I? I think; It's time people started to help me out here. I need professional help, therapy or something. But what can I say; I am a traditional young man, I do not believe in sharing my problems with a stranger.

  This week unlike all the other weeks started hectic from the word go, I was editing two green screen projects, for two different subject and teams. I realized that both the Producer had doubts on whether I would finish their projects on time or not.

  After picture lock and starting on the sound edit for the first project, my external hard drive decided it had had enough and stopped working. If you are feeling sorry for me please don't, I brought this on myself.

  Who does an edit over night and thinks nothing will go wrong. This is film; every process takes time and proper planning, but clearly I missed that fact. I worked on the edit from scratch and realized that my first edit was bad anyway.

  I managed to burn and submit on time, but the problem was that I had a Producing Festival presentation. And I did not get time to attend the final rehearsal with my Group. Which meant I did not know their cues, or anything about their part of that presentation.

  When the came for us to present, I messed up the presentation for everyone.  Because I was in charge of the slides for the whole presentation. I mixed up the slides, showed wrong slides and clips. It was messy, I tell you.

  After getting everyone crossed over that presentation; I realized that I needed some sleep before editing the second project, but that would not work. The amount of work was more than the hours I had left before submission.

  And after all I had another presentation with a different group, I did not want to dissappoint them like the last one. The different with  this presentation was that I was presenting alone on behalf of everyone. All I had to do was to be myself and try to relax.

  I nailed the presentation like I thought, but I had one cloud hanging above my head; And that was the last edit for the week. It was not much of a problem, since I was still on my editing mode. I edited and finished my edit on time.

  The only thing left; Was syncing the audio to my picture edit, since I skipped that process when I started. I sent the edit to the producer, before picture lock and he decided to do some chroma keying on Adobe After effects.

  Bare in mind that I was using Final Cut for my edit, he told me that it's easier to do colour correction and refine the Chroma Key to his standards ton After Effects. Whatever he did! Did not work, because all I could see after his effects edit was an offline message on all the clips and I couldn't believe it.

  But luckily I had a back up project, I worked from the backup and finished on time. All the submissions for the week were done on time, now all I have to do is to relax. Because it is recess time for South African Schools.

  Enjoy your holidays, if you are also on holiday. Until next time.