tape one: locked and loaded

It has begun. Last night I traveled out to Bartlett, the homebase-batcave-studio-rama where we base the majority of our "post-production" operations, some production locations, and sit in a garage enjoying the creature comforts of beer. Now, I didn't get to partake of the frothy goodness of an ice cold adult beverage... but I did get down to brass tacks with loading video into the computer. Now, I have to load the video in at "real-time" (or "reel time"). That's not a huge surprise. Everyone that makes these home-movies of sorts has to load in video at "reel time." There are some that a lucky enough to load video in a 2x speed... or even 4x speed... but those days are either long behind us or too far into the future to see. The point... it takes twice as long to load video as it does to shoot it. A one hour tape will take you somewhere around 2 and 1/2 hours to load (and that's just the good takes).

With loading the video I got a wild hair and decided to rough cut our first production shoot. The scene was a fun little warm up to the larger tasks ahead of us. So the shots are clean but not "as clean" as I would like them to be. You notice things like a slight bit of soft focus on a subject that should have been corrected... or a bag that was left just out of shot on a previous set up and is now sitting in the corner of the scene. You get to see your screw ups and how to "edit" your way out of them. God forbid that an actor does something in a good take and you don't have another edit to go to that matches the movement.

However, there is an immense joy in seeing this stuff come together. We're not close to being finished with the production... but I'm getting a jump on the POST. I'm quite pleased... I'm having fun... and we should be able to share some of it with you all very soon. So, until the next time...

-B