On Friday I finally managed to start going through my documentary, doing the final tiny bits of editing. Balancing the sound, adding the odd bit of colour correction, removing flash frames, and trimming moments when I cut in or out too early. It’s a dirty job and not one you look forward to because what you’re really doing is going through your project with a toothpick looking for problems. You come out of it feeling that:

a) you’re a bit rubbish at editing because you didn’t spot these things before
b) your programme’s a bit of a tatty bodge job because everything you’re now doing is patching up holes and doing dirty fixes.
c) It’s all a waste of time anyway because you’re doing things you hadn’t budgeted time to do because you thought you’d pretty much finished.
d) You just want to get the whole thing out of the way and get on with the next project.
e) Even when you’re done, you don’t feel happy because there’s always the nagging feeling that you’ve missed something and nobody’s now going to check your work before it gets to the distributors.

Added to this, the process always takes longer than you’d anticipated and requires you to make some tough decisions.

Top of the tough decision tree on Friday was the fact that NASA hadn’t come up with the high resolution footage I needed of a solar sail test. I’d been given the footage at 320x240 resolution and used it in the edit where it worked well, so I was looking forward to getting it at HD quality (or even PAL or NTSC)… Unfortunately, nobody at NASA was able to locate it – and even trying to contact the people responsible for the test failed, so I’ve eventually opted to replace the test footage with some general CGI shots of solar sails created by me as a test at the beginning of the project…. It doesn’t really work brilliantly, as the footage isn’t totally relevant to what’s being said.

Still, I’m not going to get the footage I need and the main focus now is to finish the project.



Refusing work
Ok – having said last week that I owe it to myself to refuse work that I know isn’t going to be worthwhile, I’ve actually put it into practice. In fact, I’ve refused two pieces of work in two working days….

The first was a book cover: the guy had a very specific idea of what he wanted to produce, but he only had a budget of $125 – which was fine, but not going to work for me in the UK where the dollar exchange rate isn’t so good. I’d have wanted to spend a couple of days on the project at least and £60 wouldn’t get me minimum wage if I had done.

The second was this morning. A client I’ve done work for before came to me with a photo composite they’d seen before, but couldn’t find anything like in any stock libraries.

It was a fun image and one I could have reproduced and been paid for. They’re a good client and know what they want and have decent budgets, so I’d have been sure of producing some good work.

However, when I started to search for textures to use in the image, I came up with the exact image they wanted on a micro stock library… priced at $2!

Of course, I could have just ignored it and done the job. But I didn’t. I told them where to find the picture they wanted and saved them £400…

‘cos I’m nice like that.