The reason why I haven’t updated for this week was because I was completely swamped with the final project. It might not have seemed that way from the post I did for Monday and Tuesday, but the sheer amount of paperwork I had to do for the final project was mind boggling. Add in the last minute things we wanted to do before leaving England that we managed to squeeze into these days, and this should make for an interesting series of posts.
Wednesday 28 July was an interesting day. To begin with, I woke up and began running around. I wrote some more papers for my class, including breakdowns, treatments and synopsis for our final project, which I was finally beginning to understand. I needed to re-draw the storyboards from our drama, because our wonderful director never ended up bringing them in, nor did he ever ask me if they were done, or check any of the billion things I had to write, print and hand in for the group. At 10:30, I went to return our film equipment to the media office. At 10:45 I went to the editing studios to attempt to help our editor piece together our project. Our new director was missing, she went to visit her husband who came to visit from Russia….I couldn’t make this stuff up, honestly.
So I filled in. We had a billion technical difficulties. Avid has been the industrial standard for editing for years and years and years, but it hasn’t changed much since it was first made. To begin with, it is one of the least user-friendly programs I have ever worked with. It’s interface looks like it was designed in the early 90s. Everything about it is counter-intuitive. Final Cut Pro is a godsend. It took me spending the day working with Avid to fully appreciate that jewel of a program. To input video clip into the timeline, you need to set in and out points in the viewer. If you decide half hour later to shorten the clip, you need to re-input it. There is no cutting or moving the clips. It needs to be done all over again.
I have NO idea why Avid is still such a massive program in the film industry. It is illogical to me. Final Cut Pro leaves it behind in the dust, AND it’s about $3,000 cheaper at least. No wonder Final Cut is becoming more of the industrial standard. After hours upon hours of struggling, we ended up transferring the footage to the editor’s laptop and working on it on her program, which is just a notch above Windows Movie Maker, and still a billion times better than Avid.
I worked with her until dinner, when I quickly changed, shoveled down some food, and left with Lisa for Camden again. We went to the Electric Ballroom to see Ok Go, a super cool Indie Band, in concert here. I put a clip of one of their songs in my Bonus Features section. They were a laid back and extremely zainey performance. They hand a confetti cannon that punctuated some of their songs. They performed one song using handbells (the one I posted). For one of their more recent songs, they wore jackets rigged with lights on the backs that scrolled the band name across. They fitted their guitars with laser beams (again, I couldn’t make this up if I tried) and using a smoke machine, made a pretty cool laser show to their song. It was to be expected from a band who made a music video entirely around a Rube Goldberg Machine.
It was an amazing show and an excellent night. It was completely unforgettable. The concert ended just after 11, we hopped back on the train and made it back by 12:30ish, which was excellent considering the busy day that followed.
