2001-11-24

Read PART 1

On the day of presentation the soundtrack had just been finished. Tom remixed to his original conception of 6 minutes 30 seconds without telling anyone. I sat with him at one of the mixing consoles burning the track to CD. I was the first to hear it. I asked if the others knew that he'd restored the enitire length of the music to twice as long as our performance lasted. His response was This is what I had to do to make myself happy.

Wow. On the one hand, I felt only a little better that he was as annoyed by them as I was; and the sparks that would fly between the three of them would make for some really good comedy, though only of the sort that suits my sense of humor. On the other hand, I still have to work with this guy one more time on a six-minute short. How much is he going to fuck the whole project if he doesn't understand that he needs to tell us when he changes the entire format?!

At noon the three of them were still scrambling to put together the electronic elements of their work. Four hours left to showtime, and we still had never rehersed the piece. Sarah couldn't get the editing software to recognize what she'd done at home. She'd spent all morning transfering files back and forth over the network to different editing suites between different servers. Only later did I realize that she couldn't have possibly gotten any work done because there wasn't any source material on any of her discs.

When editing video with computers, the software creates several different storage folders for different elements of the project. It's not like a single word-processing file saved in one place. When you edit a video together, the computer remembers what actions take place when and where and for how long, ect, and puts them in a separate folder. But it does nothing to the actual footage files; it leaves them alone in another folder. Video editing is like building a recipe; the computer saves the instructions for cooking as you work, but never actually touches the ingredients - the video footage - until you're all done.

What Sarah had done is copy all of her instructions to disc, but forgot the actual video footage files. The computer repeated error after error, "I'm ready to bake this cake, but where are the eggs, the milk, the flour?" Her and Robin's stress levels were peaking at redline. This was no time to assign blame, no time for 'if only you hadn't cut me out of the project....' I tried to be helpful, but at two o'clock, with no rehersal time, I told them we had only two choices.

We could go on with the presentation with music, sans video, or we could beg for a postponement. This is where my sinning begins. With my lines memorized, my costume waiting, I was secretly gloating that their whole power trip was crumbling with every passing minute. The icing on the cake was never having to lift a finger to enjoy sweet satisfaction.

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