May 17, 2009 by AnnaChristine
This post is referring to this project http://www.annachristine.com/motion/dandelion.php
So I thought I would update about my week, as it was unusual for me and probably the most I have ever worked consecutively. Alright so let’s see…
It all started last weekend, in that it was when I did a bulk of the post-production work on my documentary. I spent all night Friday, most of Saturday and most of Sunday at the office cutting down this 50 minute interview down to around 5 minutes. Well, things always seem to take longer than you anticipate, I took monday off and then decided Tuesday that if I was going to get this thing done in time for the presentation at AIGA’s SPOT then I’d have to spend every waking moment on it, and by that I meant I had to be awake at all times to get it done in time. So began my sleeplessness adventure. I bought a 6 pack of 5-hour energy and got to it, I took my first shot around 10pm Tuesday evening, and worked on finessing the edit and color correction, I did the same for the next night as well so I could stay awake. During the second night, hallucinating began, and I was getting loopy. It was pretty crazy, I saw flying cars, a giant robot, running shadows, and at one point I mistook a doll display for someone hanging from the ceiling. Morbid, I know.
Thursday was the craziest day of all. I had completed everything else, I was just putting the finishing touches on the video. I finally began rendering around 3:00 only for the program to tell me that it would take at least three hours…. The event began at 6! I decided late is better than never so I went and killed the render time with working on storyboarding some scripts. When I came back, I found something terrible! “disk space almost full” with 45 minutes left on the render!
Thankfully Tom came and helped me figure out something to delete so I could get the render going again. It finally finished around 6:30, then It took at least 20 minutes to transfer from the desktop to the harddrive to my laptop. I compressed the video further on my speedy trek to the event. Once I arrived it was already 7:15, I was supposed to be there at least by 7… and on top of being late, I had to beg the parking guy to let me take a space for a bit as I had no money and had no time to drive around looking. Then when I parked, it started raining, so I had to cover my laptop and jet to the building. A building which looks like it has two main entrances that have no way to get to them, so I had to run around three sides of the building to get inside. I run in out of breath, upset, flustered. Everyone seemed concerned, I felt terrible. I made it upstairs and set down my laptop and opened up the video…
It started lagging! WHY?! I just compressed it? After a bit of frantic panicking and upsettedness, my mentor said something that made me think “wait, is this compressed?” Of course, like an idiot, I accidently opened the uncompressed version that was 12gbs and had no chance of ever playing smoothly.
After I opened the right version, everything felt like it just lifted off of my shoulders. All of the hard work and sweat and tears had come to an end. I came close to winning even though I wasn’t there as long as the others. bummer, but the girl who won totally deserved it, her stuff was amazing!
It was crazy, and stressful and chaotic, but worth it, I’m happy with the result. 
See my hard work’s result here: http://www.annachristine.com/motion/dandelion.php