Day of Delivery (Overdue?)

I had my trusty partner watch and note what errors she could. What a shocker that she found an abundant supply of errors and "feel" problems. Three pages of notes and most of it was simple fixes I should never have had to make. If I'm going to generate a fake background sound, I should use audio with a pop or vocals in it. It just sounds cyclic and unpleasant.

I still hadn't figured out how to fix my DVD disk drive, so I devised a plan to upload all video information to an external hard drive and transfer it to a functioning PC with a functioning disk drive. Also, I had to upload a DVD architect program to build a menu for the final video. I spent all of my time after work, working on this. Up again until 2am, I managed to get 5 hard copies burned. Two of these had a image printed onto the disk and three had none. I was learning how to build a DVD menu with links, scene selection and all the appropriate chapters. I added chapter markers so a viewer could fast forward or skip to a certain scene. End run time was just over 17 minutes.

I mailed the DVDs off to their new homes. I saved the other three for myself, partner and one for my music guy to review. With the now final product on DVD, I had my partner watch again. Together we gave up all our best criticisms. The opening part was out of focus. The auto focus was not focusing where I needed it. I need to get better at controlling the lens. The audio in parts was either too loud or too quiet. I trimmed out some rather long sequences and just faded in and out of them to show time passing without stating it. My very minimal notice was that the sound of foot steps is there in the beginning and not later. It's hard to catch that after several nearly sleepless nights.

All in all, the product is delivered. The clients likes their merchandise. For $1500, they received a lot more than they would have received otherwise. I don't have all the latest and greatest equipment. My editing station is cramped and with the disk drive not working, a real point of difficulties. My understanding of the lighting and focusing of the lenses, kept me from catching focus issues and some strange coloring issues. With those failings, I offered; Filming, blocking, scripting, direction, lighting, voice over recording (done by assistant), original music score (done with musician and my oversight), editing and scoring, and the production of a few master copies with a fully designed menu and chapter selection mode.

My break-down looks like this:

Filming = 16 hours (myself and helper 8 hours each)

Blocking = 4 hours (part of filming but made it take longer)

Scripting = 4 hours (solo)

Lighting = (part of filming)

Voice Over Recording = 1 hour (assistant)

Created Music = 4 hours (myself and musician 2 hours each)

Editing = 30 hours (solo estimate)

Design & Production = 5 hours





grand total = 64 labor hours

future projects of similar size should be about 40-50 hours