Coming up the following weekend is the August club meeting/cruise-in at Didley’s Car Hop in Metamora, Saturday August 7th at 6pm.  Join the club in an away-from-the-usual spot for the usual: a meal, a quick meeting, driving around, and ice cream.  Then run home and donate to the St. Jude Midwest Affiliate, the telethon for which I’ll be working that evening out of Bloomington.  Watch on WEEK-25 between 6:30pm and 12:30am… I’ll be the guy you never see on the air.  :-)

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.