Allright, I know this is a totally random reference, but does anyone remember that song, “You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking cross the floor. You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking out the door.”
Yeah, probably not. After all, it wasn’t a hit record or anything. It was actually from one of those 1970’s era claymation Christmas stories. The one with Baby New Year, I believe. And no, I have no idea what the name was, despite remembering the song.
Anyhow, I woke up with that stuck in my head this morning. A nice little retro theme song it is, and an even better intro for today’s installment of blog.
After months of delays, funding snafus and the usual hodge-podge of independent film making pitfalls, I am happy to report progress on Liability U. Recently I had the opportunity to interview 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. 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 ooppps…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 spend 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, it was kind of a relief to do it. Sometimes, it’s 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.