so clearly I’m still alive.
I’ll begin with an update. As previously blogged Key West Cock Tales played the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival on October 16, 2008. Originally, I planned on going, but then I woke up. Realistically I just couldn’t afford it right now. However, the folks down in Gainesville were kind enough to give me an update:
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Hi Christa,
The turn out wasn’t what we hoped….that said, the folks that were there loved Key West Cock Tales and continued to chat about it as they left the theater. So you guys were a hit.
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Sounds like things went pretty well. It’s too bad they didn’t get a better turn out though.
In a related note, since I had already asked for the time off, I decided to use my time wisely by spending a long weekend (4 days) shooting, interviewing and capturing video for Liability U.
The cornerstone of this was doing my first “expert” interview for the film, which was with Davidson college’s president Thomas W. Ross. Davidson made headlines as the first liberal college in the country to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all their students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. And after a year or so of focusing the filming on debt and lack, I felt it was time to inject some hope into the mix. I had a great time at Davidson and enjoyed meeting President Ross and talking with him about the issue of college affordability and why he and the folks over at Davidson felt it was important not to strap the next generation of graduates with overwhelming debt.
Following that up, I took some time out to just go and get the heck out of dodge. This lead me to the greater Richmond, Virginia area where I splurged and busted the budget on a new $30 shirt at the Tahari outlet. (Where some day when I’m not broke I plan to spend some cash on the nice professional looking work clothes I wish I could wear on a daily basis.) Along the way I filled up on $2.49/gallon gas and basked in the glow of feeling free of present circumstances, dead end jobs, pointlessness, and poverty.
And then I headed back home ’cause I really couldn’t afford to get all the way to D.C. or book a motel room.
Back in Durham, I did beaucoup capturing and started organizing the files on my computer. Then, like an idiot, I saved a backup copy of the LU project file onto my Firewire drive, not realizing that the LU file the computer was asking me if I wanted to replace was actually the LU folder containing all 30-40 hours of raw video I had already digitized. (I thought it was a previous version of the project file.) So oops…there goes my video. (I didn’t have the raw video backed up, because I either would have had to shell out more cash in order to do so, or spent a day or two burning them all to about a million DVD’s.)
Ahh….the joys of being an anonymous filmmaker.
So, needless to say last weekend I spent both Saturday and Sunday recapturing the whole darn thing. And although I could be whining and crying about it, I was kind of relieved to do it. It was very freeing to just scrap the entire thing and start over. I got reacquainted with the footage, found stuff I had forgotten to capture in the first place, and was able to let go of all the previously edited sequences that I felt had to go into the film, despite not knowing how they were going to work.
Lesson learned: Disaster can be a blessing in disguise that leads you on to a brand new level of clarity.
Yee-haw.
Anyhow tomorrow there’s a filmmaker’s forum down at the Broadstreet Cafe from 1 to 5. It’s supposed to link up filmmakers with musicians for project collaborations. I am actually in a place now, where I could use some music, and I have a good grasp on what it needs to be like. So…I’ll be there, continuing to eat this elephant one bite at a time.
And then it’s on to a costume party???