April 18, 2016
It’s done, over, finally finished. It uploaded to YouTube at 5:30 yesterday. It’s weird to have it available to the public. I’ve got to say, the film went by really quickly. I mean it was 17 minutes and 29 seconds long, but the pacing was pretty fast. I didn't feel that way while I was editing.
I had a premiere and presentation to my family (with BTS commentary and all of that.) They really enjoyed the film and loved the professional quality to it.That’s great and relieving to hear, because I was toiling on this project until the moment I hit export. Ryan Connolly, a favorite filmmaker of mine quotes it right: “A film doesn’t finish, it escapes.”
Regardless of my crunch time, the film was late. Jack put up a short video apologizing for the delay and that it would be uploaded sometime Saturday.
I got to stay home (because of some sleep deprivation and need of a mental break, bordering on breakdown) and work all day Thursday in hopes of a Friday release. Because of all of sound work that needed to be done and all of the reviewing passes I needed to make, the project didn’t get released that night. Neither did it get finished the next day because I had hardly any time to work on it. It took all of Saturday to get the film finished. I spent that time adding titles, doing final fixes on the sound, and answering some comments on the previous exports. (Patrick actually made a good catch, he pointed out where the film repeats a little bit. It wouldn’t be noticeable unless the viewer was paying close attention, but if it were put on a TV set, I bet it would be a glaring error.)
I hit the export button at about 10:00 that night. It was going to take at least three hours to render. Jack said not to worry about it.
I get up the next morning and found that the video didn’t render out some clips and instead replaced them with a red error screen. I had to export it again. Two hours later, the same thing happened. I later had the idea to just replace the unloaded clips in the exported file. That provided a fix and the export time dramatically decreased. I was able to successfully export the video that Sunday (April 17.) Now it’s uploaded to YouTube and I also added an engaging (hopefully) thumbnail taken from the video itself.
Now it’s time to just share it with the world. I’ve already advertised “Liquid Lightning” on Facebook and Twitter, though I haven’t gotten to Instagram yet. My goal is to get at least 100 views and we are currently at about 60. I’m actually at a bit of crossroads when it comes to that. It would be splendid to get a massive amount of views, but having so many people see that work, I’m nervous that there is some kind of glaring mistake or just general people hate it. It will be incredibly hard to watch it with a group of people who I can’t guarantee won’t rip it apart. I guess I will just have to suck it up. It will be nice to get a lot of viewership without a negative response. I mean, what’s the point in making a movie if no one watches it?
Overall, I did have fun in some areas, but most of the time it was a lot of work. It was work I enjoyed, but it was still labor and lots of time. Liquid Lightning is the greatest show of work ethic and dedication in my life. Now it’s going to be difficult to go back to school work and end of the year summatives. It gets incredibly stressful, which is another reason I wished the project didn’t run this long.
I think I overestimated my abilities when doing something this ambitious. The time commitment was crazy, with all of the VFX shots I had planned and the sound and what not. Every aspect of the film was late, every deadline was broken. I pretty much had to reschedule every other day and nothing went as planned. I also didn’t have time for much else while I was heavy into the filmmaking, and I think other aspects of my life (mostly academic) suffered for it.
Despite that, I’m glad I made it. I say it was a major coming of age project. I’ve experienced a wider variety of creative emotions in these eight months than I have in my whole filmmaking life (that’s about four years now.) I definitely think I’ve grown as a filmmaker and storyteller from this experience.
I made something that I can be proud of and I should be, though I still have a healthy amount of sheepishness and chagrin towards it, but I think that’s normal for any artist.
So, what’s next? First, I’m going to create a compilation of these process journals. It would be nice to reflect on the making the short film (plus, I would like to see how much I’m written. 35 entries is no joke!). I might post them somewhere and share my story, however these journals do get a little personal and they’ve hardly been proofread. Carter says I should start a blog for my next projects. All that writing can get a little tedious, but I’ll keep it in mind (who would read it though?)
I’m also going to give a more formal reflection to the movie. Each time I complete a video production, I feel out a survey I created called “Film Statistics.” It starts out with basic things like when did you start and stop, what genre is it? Then it goes into more opening ended questions like “are you happy with the way it turned out?”
I want to share it in the film festival circuit. It was difficult to find one for high schoolers with films over 10 minutes, but I think I have one. I have my eyes set on the All American High School Film Festival. Their “Under 25” division allows for films up to 20 minutes long. However, I think it’s only meant for college students.
But most importantly, I’m going to take a break. Finish out the school year and focus on school. I need to relax my brain. Unfortunately, the end of this project drop me right into the end of the year testing zone. My mind has to go into overtime once again cramming from the finals. When that’s done, I’m going to sleep. A lot.
I’m going to take about a month or more break from film. After that, I’m going to do one or two summer projects. They are going to be small. I mean no more than seven minutes small. I mean that if the script thinks about going over ten pages, I’ll be there, with some scissors, cutting it down.
And who knows, I may add some extra Liquid Lightning related activity. I don’t know, maybe some Behind- the- Scenes, VFX Breakdowns, creator commentaries, the works. It would depend on how I feel over the next couple of weeks and the demand. I would love to make something extra like that, it also might help in filling up our Act 9 YouTube channel with some content.
The most wonderful thing is that it’s over. I started a passion project, finished it, and I’ve grown from it. This was my greatest learning experience/ adventure yet and I plan on having many more to come.