Since April, my life has been a blur.  Events piling up on top of each other, moving at a speed too fast for me to properly comprehend.  Now, there is a lull and I don’t know if it’s for a week or an hour, but I feel like a kid that’s ridden on the merry-go-round too many times and now just wants to get off for a while.

April was devoted almost entirely to producing Hamlet.  It took weeks of trial and error, and long, gruelling hours preparing and shooting. To complicate matters, I got maybe a  couple hours here and there off at the end of my normal 8-5 work week to accomodate the project.  Working 12-14 hours a day was normal, 16-20 was not uncommon during those two weeks. The result was me being so exhausted by lack of sleep and stress that when time the show opened on April 23 that I didn’t know which way was up.  I was the walking wounded, dragged along only by will power.  After every long, long day that ended with me carrying equipment past midnight, I would have to get up early in the morning to do the increasingly incoherent maintenance work.

Now, it’s two weeks after Hamlet wrapped.  I still am not sleeping right.  However, I’m excited to start working with the footage we shot.  The audio is inconsistent, but I believe that the Friday night show was strong enough that we can use it to cover for the shortcomings of our technology.  I learned alot about organizing and shooting a big event doing Hamlet.  I think that in the long run it will be worth the long hours.  It’s to eLearning’s credit that I had the chance to do a creative project at all!

After nearly two months, I bit the bullet and started editing the Little City Rollergirls vs. Star City bout from February, 28.  It’s simple, yet I’m happy with it. I’ve not edited a real project in a long time (and that was on beta.)  The girls seem happy and the Director of Digital Media is saturating ETSU’s video channels with the videos.  Fourteen ten minute episodes will represent one of the few complete matches available online. Noli Chuckya and Devilique think that they are the best quality derby vids out there.

My vids have all been on hold up until now.  There’s just no time left. (My TIVO has been full for weeks!) I’m carving out some weekends to start shooting DCTV spots starting next weekend, then some horror shorts after that.

Mountain MAY-hem on May 9 turned out to be a massive project. The camera setup went great, but I misunderstood the final track setup and didn’t have enough cable to properly run the cameras into the switcher for the big screen.  We also ran the laptop into a foreign projector instead of the one I brought making the scoreboard distorted.  It was a great learning experience. Working with Highlight Productions who did the light rigging and A/V Integration (who just nailed the sound) was great.  Next time should be amazing! Georgia O’Queefee was absolutely right when she pointed out we needed new scoreboard software. IMO, we need someone else to handle it.  There was so much technical tweaking and details to deal with right up until the match began that I felt unprepared. I won’t announce unprepared again.  I was too distracted, I totally forgot what a Grand Slam was when Joe Bagadonuts put me on the spot and looked like an ass.  Despite my flub, Joe was great to work with! He gets better every time.

That’s enough for now.  I have some really exciting projects coming up this summer.  I’ll go into some detail about them once life returns to sharper focus.