Media Stats

• MIJC Elements folder (photos, some video clips): 7465 files, 135 folders, 91.9 GB
• Total of 7 tapes shot for the open (7 hours of footage)
• Total hours spent: 195.  If this was a full-time job, this is nearly 5 weeks of 8-hour days @ 5 days per week.
• Man-hours spent: 397 (counting hours other people worked as well)

Avid Files (Avid is the editing software I use)

• total # of media files (digitized audio and video clips, photos): 6287 (4678 video, 1609 audio)
• total # of precomputes (rendered effects, titles, etc): 2169 (1298 video, 871 audio)
• Total 273.64 GB of material

Watching the club enjoy the fruits of our hard work: priceless.

D-Day.  I got up and headed over to campus to make the copies to distribute to the club members.  We have a duplicator at work that can run 8 at a time, but it still took longer than I thought.  A disc that’s completely full takes just over 10 minutes to do a set of copies, so it took a few hours to get them all done.

A bunch of you know that I do some freelance work aside from my “real job” televising basketball games for several regional cable channels.  I actually had to turn down three different games for today, knowing there’s no way I’d have time to do even a day game.  But while I was making the DVD copies, I got an emergency phone call from the guy taking my place at the Civic Center… he was working an unfamiliar TV truck which, to complicate matters, was late arriving at the arena, and he was having trouble getting set up for the broadcast.  So I spent a few hours helping with that, then finished the copies and headed home with just enough time to get ready and head over to Goodfellas.  It was tighter than I would have liked, but I couldn’t just leave those guys high and dry.

As I always do, I sat in the back of the room so I could watch everyone’s reactions… everyone laughed where they were supposed to, and gasped where they were supposed to.  At the end, Jon and Frank were a little late with their cue to come in and Frank couldn’t get the briefcase open at first, but we still got a big round of applause.

Another successful year.  Now for next year…

Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  It’s almost 2am and I finished just about everything in time for one final check tomorrow.  The dinner disc is rendering now… I’m going to bed.

January 15, 2010 (7 hours)

I spent some time in the morning fixing an annoying typo in the credits… this required re-rendering the whole dinner disc again (which on this machine takes about 2 hours).  So many little details!  While it was burning, I ran an errand for work and came back home again just in time to see the disc finish, so I set the giveaway disc rendering as well and went back to work.

After work the giveaway disc was done.  Jon, Jill and Frank came over to do a final viewing and disc test.  My hope was that no changes would be required and I wouldn’t have to re-make the discs, but we quickly found several small problems that were (as a group) worth fixing.  So another re-render for the dinner version, and as I write this I’m waiting for that to finish so I can set the giveaway disc rendering again overnight.  We did find a few stray curse words in the extra features that I forgot to censor, so that disc was definitely worth doing over.

Much discussion was had during the evening about the logistics of where Frank and Jon would be able to change clothes during the last song. I’m going to scope it out tomorrow afternoon at Goodfellas when I arrive to set up.  I hope we’re able to pull it off!

In the morning I’ll run over to campus and make all the copies, then it’s hurry up and wait until 5:00!

Tonight I reviewed all the separate segments looking for any problems and only found a few, which I fixed.  Jon will be over on Thursday to do a final review before I make the disc to play at the dinner, so in the meantime I started working on the extra features that will go onto the DVD.  First up was the side-by-side comparison of the shot where the brothers are driving in front of the prison, and then I spent the rest of the evening cutting together behind-the-scenes footage to “Peter Gunn”.  I still have a few more segments to do but I should have no problem finishing them before Thursday.

January 13, 2010 (4 hours)

I was off work this morning so I put the time to good use.  Done now are the kids outtakes and more side-by-side shot comparisons. I really like how those turned out.  Also, I found a mistake in the open.  After the portrait shots and the in-studio hug, the next shot has the gate all overgrown again, and closed.  I remember I had talked about superimposing the gate closing from the movie but I never actually did it.  So I spent a couple hours adding that in.  The only tricky part was cutting the Jeep out as it passed in front of the gate, but it was only 39 frames and since it’s a lot of straight lines and I only had to do the portion of the Jeep that blocked the gate, it was fairly easy.  It looks good and I’m glad I took the time to do it.

Jon came over to “supervise” more editing.  I finished adding video and photos to “Everybody” while he touched up some of the gate cutout photos on his laptop.  We re-imported that scene and although it still doesn’t look perfect, it does look better.  Chalk up another 90 minutes spent on that 5 seconds!

I spent about a half hour changing the blue sky on the prison exterior shots over to more of a golden-yellow sunrise, which would match the golden light pouring out of the gate when Jake walks out.  In the end I wasn’t happy with the way it looked, and neither was Jon.  It looked OK but it also looked somewhat fake, and we didn’t want to ruin the realism of the shot (i.e. the fact that we drove up to Joliet to shoot it).  I probably could have spent more time and different techniques working on it to up the realism factor, but in the end it was a beautiful blue sky the day we shot, and it looked fine in its original form.  So we left it alone.

So the video is pretty much done.  Tuesday I’ll run through all of the segments and do a final check for anything that needs adjustment, then do the final assembly into one 29-minute timeline.  It ended up being a little bit longer than we thought (by about 4 minutes), and in fact is the longest video we’ve ever done by about a minute or so.  But I think it flows, and people will enjoy it.  More is always better, right?

Still to do: edit together the extra features for the DVD then author the DVD itself, along with a “dinner disc” copy that only has the main video on it and no menus.

I cut out a bunch of the gate frames sitting in a hotel room in Des Moines, then at another hotel later in the day in Omaha.  It’s grueling work.  Not fun.  I tried to get a friend of mine who was on the trip with me to help but he was not interested.  I got the to-cut list down to about 30 frames.

Sunday, January 10, 2010 (13 hours)

Today is all editing, all day.  This is the last full day I have to work on the video.  Jon came over around 9:00 and I got him going on cutting out more gate frames, while I captured more lost video from Harlan County.  Once I got it capturing, I took over for Jon and finished all the frames.  We were excited to see the final effect after putting so much time into it (about 8-9 hours in total spent on a 5-second clip).  In the end, the effect looked pretty good.  Not perfect, but pretty good for what we had to work with.  To make it look a little more natural, I also applied an effect onto Jon’s image to start him out more in silhouette, then gradually lighten him up as he walked out into the sunshine.  It did help a bit.

We decided that if there was time, I’ll go back and tweak a few of the cutout frames as well as make an attempt to make the blue sky more yellow, to match the sunrise/sunset that’s pouring out from the open prison gate shot we stole from the movie.  Those tasks fall firmly into the “if there’s time” category, though.  Like I said before: it’s never done, you just run out of time.

Around mid-day I realized that I had lost and/or not made a copy of Tom and Sally’s footage from Duke’s Off-Road Ranch in July.  I needed it in order to finish “Everybody Needs Somebody”, so Jon drove out to Morton to get Tom and Sally’s copy while I started working on the final song, “Sweet Home Chicago”.

By 10:30pm “Chicago” was done and I was tired of editing, so I set the Duke’s footage capturing and went to bed.  Altogether it was a very productive day, and I’m no longer worried about not getting the video done.

I finished “Walkin’”, but realized that I had forgotten to import some footage Sally gave me.  It was still on a DVD.  It’s a 2-step process to get it from that into the editing software, so I started dubbing it over to a tape when I realized my mistake.  Once I get it imported I’ll see if I can replace any shots with the Evans’ footage.  I also found their extensive footage from Harlan County, which has one of the best shots of the year: Tom rolling his Jeep.  Can’t forget to include that!

I realized after I had the song completely done that I accidentally put the Washita and Flat Nasty trips in the wrong order.  Oh well… not going to go back and re-do them now.  After that, I made short work of “Can’t Turn You Loose”… I decided to just put both parades with that song, since it’s only about 30 seconds long.  Done and done.  I wish they all went so quickly!

The rest of the evening was spent capturing video from Sally’s discs.  Jon was going to come over and work on the prison gate some more tonight but he wasn’t feeling well.  I’m out of town on business the rest of the week and I have a down day in a hotel on Friday, so I’ll bring my laptop and hopefully get all the frames cut out then.

Jon volunteered to cut out the rest of the prison gate frames, so I got him going on that in the kitchen with my laptop while I worked on other parts of the video.  He quickly realized how time-consuming that kind of work is.  He got 11 out of 90 frames done in a couple of hours.  Meanwhile, I captured Frank’s speech for “Everybody Needs Somebody” and got that dropped into the song in both places.  Then I continued working on filling in “I’m Walkin’” with more photos and video clips.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 (2 hours)

More work on “Walkin’”.  I try to give each person who was on a trip their moment in the sun, but sometimes it’s hard to find good clips or photos of everyone who went.  Sometimes people were just at the opposite end of the pack from the “Press Corps” members who take most of the pictures.

Every time I think we’re done shooting, there’s more quick pickups to do.  As I was planning out the music, I noticed that Elwood’s original speeches in “Everybody Needs Somebody” would need to be removed and replaced.  So we got Frank back into his costume hopefully for the last time and brought him over to the studio.  Since we didn’t have a backing band, I set it up to look like a single spotlight on Frank over a black background.  It actually looked really good in the end.

We shot about 13-15 takes of the first speech, some with Frank bouncing to the (imagined) beat, some with him standing still.  We used a teleprompter so he wouldn’t have to memorize the whole thing, but there were still plenty of outtakes.  When we watched the footage back, the tape had some kind of problem and none of it turned out.  So we had to go back and repeat everything we had done, plus do the second speech.  It was very frustrating.  It was especially frustrating because Frank had plenty of great outtakes that we lost, but his performance was also better.

When I got home with the tape, it played just fine, so that was good, but that was a lot of time wasted and overall frustration.

A little more editing… more planning stuff out.

Monday, December 28 (2 hours)

Worked on the credits today.  The beauty of editing on a computer is that you can work in whatever order you want.  I felt like working on the end, so I did.  I edited “Jailhouse Rock” down to a decent length from the original piece, typed in all the names for the rolling credits, and picked out some good outtakes and behind-the-scenes shots.  I also started dropping photos into “Gimme Some Lovin”.

Thursday, December 31, 2009 (5 hours)

Finished all the photos and video for “Gimme Some Lovin”, then finalized the moves and transitions on all the shots in the song.  Jon came over and watched me edit for a few hours, which actually helps me stay focused on the task and gives me a second opinion (whether I want it or not).

We then worked on “I’m Walkin”, inserting the shots of the kids as well as the shots of Jake and Elwood promoting “the gig” as they drove around Peoria.  I came up with a very convincing effect to mimic the amplified PA sound Elwood had in the movie.  The kids were a little difficult to find good clips to use for each part of the sentence.  I’ll probably include a little montage of the kids’ takes on the DVD.  Some of it is pretty funny.