The Gods of Technology Have Won This Round...

Sigh.

I've put off writing this because it's just... yeah.

For the last three years, off and on, I've been working on my indie movie, "Vagabond Lane" - a film that has cost upwards of $60,000 to complete. Three weeks ago I finally hit a video lock, and I was two weeks from finishing the whole damn thing, only needing to add the dialogue replacement that I needed to record for two scenes.

The light at the end of the tunnel was not only visible, it was bright and brilliant and shiny and all those things that one can find at the end of a My Pretty Pony or Care Bears cartoon. I, as they say, was pretty damn happy.

Until last week.

Last week my car had to go into the shop, my Panasonic DVX100-B died, and the computer I was editing VL on decided to play shy. It sorta went like this:

FADE UP on WILL sitting in his living room, preparing to edit VL for one of the last times. He's all sorts of happy, and can imagine an angelic choir singing above him. He boots up his trusty iMac.

A frown crosses Will's face as a GRAY SCREEN OF UNHAPPINESS appears on the iMac monitor. It reads: YOU NEED TO REBOOT YOUR IMAC (along with a bunch of other stuff). Will frowns, holds down the power button and waits, then reboots his computer. Will's frown is joined by wide eyes as a GRAY SCREEN OF UNHAPPINESS appears again on the iMac monitor. It reads: YOU NEED TO REBOOT YOUR IMAC (along with a bunch of other stuff).

Crap.

Now, at this point, I'm as calm as I can be - after all, I've saved finished and rendered files to my externals, so... no problem, right?

Wrong.

Somewhere in the last three weeks of editing and saving and rendering and all that crap, my nicely processed scenes had turned into blocky and ugly crap - somewhere FCP had decided to re-render them out at the lowest possible quality and...

... and yeah.

So here I am. My car is on life support, my camera is still awaiting a guts transplant, and I'm working on a borrowed computer and knowing that the borrowed time I've spent editing this movie was spent six months ago, and I have to QUITE LITERALLY re-edit and re-capture all the video footage for the movie.

The positives of this whole thing are that it gives me a chance to make an even better movie, and at least the audio mix is still intact. Still, I feel as if I'm reaching into the dark grey storm clouds to grasp a few tentative silver linings. I feel as if I've let everyone involved in the project down, everyone I've EVER KNOWN down, and proven myself to be an abject failure at this whole "movie thing."

So yeah.

Yeah.

The God's of Technology hate me, and the only thing I can do is pick my ass up out of the dirt, pick up the pieces and carry on towards the finish line that was dangled in front of my outstretched hands and then yanked away by that evil bastard Fate and his or her cohorts. The last week has sucked; every time I thought of the movie, I just wanted to put my head in the blender. But time heals blah blah blah and I'm getting back into my skull with some sense of perspective and a few ideas that I can still do this. It's just a real bitch, and to all of you that have supported me in this project, all I can say is "thank you" and "please be patient with me."

Will