I was going to work to submit a rough cut of my film to the Barebones Festival on the 16th, which was Tuesday, but a couple of things prevented me from doing so. The first was that I wasn't comfortable with putting it out to be judged yet since although I have the shots I need, I hadn't cut them in yet, and the sound was still a mess. The second, and more amusing, reason I couldn't do it was because I couldn't afford to. While that's not necessarily funny, it plays into the amusing part.
This film is what's referred to as a "no budget" film in that it literally had no budget to shoot it. Some might think that means I only spent a couple hundred bucks on it, but no kidding, I spent almost nothing on it. I bought tapes for $20, built a steadi-cam rig for about $10, and developed a picture for $2. This means the up front cost of this movie was $32. The other equipment used I got from other people or The Engineer got himself (and to be fair, he did get a nice little sound thing for his laptop to record the sound on). The entry fee for the festival was $55, meaning that the entry fee was actually more than the cost of my movie. Isn't that funny?
The second thing that happened recently concerned my working through the shots I had gotten that I needed to fully complete it. I was off the last couple of days for the birthdays of both The Socialite and Sassy Pants. I like to take everyone's birthdays off, and while the first of the year didn't work out too well, I finally got to take off the birthdays in the last part of the year. Well, one of those days was spent with everyone as school was still out due to ice, but Thursday was a regular school day. This means that I was going to be all by myself for the middle part of the day since The Queen substitutes at the preschool that Sassy Pants goes to.
She asked me what I was going to do with all that time I had to myself, and I declared that I was going to finish my movie. Well, the whole time wasn't to be mine, to be sure. I got to take The Socialite to lunch for her birthday (a real treat, since I usually work), I saw the Queen at the preschool, attended the Socialite's Christmas (sorry, holiday) party, and I had to get something for the Queen for Christmas without her being with me. In the end, I had no time to work on my movie at all. I spent a few minutes on it trying to remove the extra crap from the footage that I couldn't use, but I didn't get much of anywhere on it.
This is not to say that my days off didn't go well. I enjoyed my time with the family, and we did our best to make their birthdays fun with what we could do. They each picked where they wanted to eat dinner. They were each the VIP for the day, which made Rock Girl withdraw quite a bit since the focus was not on her at all, and she'd been out of school for five days by the end of it. On Thursday, she apparently relished the peer to peer conversation and was quite a bit happier at the end of the day.
And of course, they thoroughly enjoyed all the movies watched on Wednesday. We watched A Bug's Life during the day, but that night, I got to surprise them with Wall-E, which I've checked out from the library. They really enjoy that movie.
Did I ever get to work on my movie? Oh yeah. About ten last night, I sat down to work on it. I went to bed at two...but it's a lot closer to being done.
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