Monday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon: a bad day.
As a film major, so constantly am I busily working on projects, both for myself and especially others, that numerous "bad days" and sleepless nights ensue in the typical course of a semester. Here follows the account of one such day:
For the past few weeks, a friend and I have been steadily utilizing what little free time we possess to fine-tune a documentary we originally filmed last fall for Junior Nonfiction Production. Why now? Well, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival's deadline was yesterday and we had always planned (and been urged by others) to submit, after a few minor tweaks to titles, color, and sound. Yet, in the post-production world, there exists extremely few "tweaks" that ever require a "minor" amount of effort. At least in my experience, no post-production phase ever seems to go along at a leisurely, comfortable pace. Instead, despite your best laid plans, you usually end up riding that deadline right up until the blurry, haggard end.
Long story short, I spent 16 near-continuous hours (excluding an hour-long break for a meeting I couldn't miss), from Monday afternoon to Tuesday morning, in the god-forsaken NLE (Non-Linear Editing lab). My NLE record, I am ashamed to admit, is 18 hours straight of post-sound on a senior's thesis, with no breaks, except for the occasional down-the-hall bathroom and vending machine jaunt. That sorry achievement was reached last spring during a "Dead Week" period of eight days in which I pulled four all-nighters on projects and papers, including one for World Literature. Before the end, I was dry-heaving and basically hallucinating - my first time experiencing both activities stone-cold sober. By the end, I had nearly lost all humanity and transformed into a zombie. My body hated me. That experience reinforced my determination to avoid any future all-nighters, an endeavor in which I had been successful until Monday night.
The good news is, we finished the film and created a nice DVD menu, again, and got it postmarked by the 20th. Of course, there exists an exponential amount of further fenagling and refining that we could perform. Ideally, we would have done more color correction, created more layered motion graphics, and beefed up the non-dialogue soundtrack even more - but for two full-time students, I feel we got it to a solid place.
The bad news is, I had a Brit Lit 1 midterm. Since I had been splitting the majority of my time during the weekend between working on the film and operating video projection for The Life & Times of Tulsa Love Child, I wasn't able to do any significant studying. The entirety of my Monday was spent in class and then the NLE. So, upon wearily returning to my apartment around 6 a.m., I took an obligatory shower (trust me) and then commenced to study. Battling fatigue and gastronomical problems stemming from a 4am gas station burrito and coffee/energy drinks in an effort to fight said fatigue, my studying session wasn't very successful. I tried to avoid skipping Bible as Lit in favor of studying, but failed. The hours seemed to melt away, with me making little headway. All of the sudden, it was time. Once in class, test in hand, my essay answers rambled in a way suited to sleep-deprivation, with relatively little support from an unfinished quotations sheet we were allowed to make. Regardless of extenuating circumstances, as a slow writer and test-taker I was the last to finish (or, rather, to hurriedly scribble into some semblance of a finish). I reassured myself that it was not the end of the world, that my sleepless jitters were simply getting the best of my already anxious nature, but I could have definitely gone without embarrassingly skulking past Dr. Sexson as he prepared for his incoming Nabokov class.
(Side plug: Tulsa Love Child, a quirky roadtrip comedy, has its last run this weekend, Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm, in the Black Box. Get there early, last Saturday's show sold out!)
A bad day to be sure, but at least it only involved school-work and filmmaking, and sleep, with some amount of relief in knowing the mad-dash was all over for the time being. No
deaths, no grief, no sickness, no moral quandaries, no deity harshly "testing" my faith like poor old Job. Could have been worse.
By the way, if you're easily offended, then refrain from any Job-related Google Image searching with "SafeSearch" turned off. Lots of words end in job, most of them "NSFW" to say the least.
Through a minimal amount of searching, I came upon a bunch of artwork from William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. To the right is one of my favorites, in which Satan goes "forth from the presence of the Lord" and gleefully inflicts Job with boils. Now that's a bad day.
Link to a larger version: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/exhibits/blake/job/job07.gif
Link to the entire collection:
No comments:
Post a Comment