The First Cut Is Done

I repeat: the first, proper, watchable cut of 'Ciplak' is DONE. Finished. Completed. Viewable without having to ask, "what happened between that bit and that other bit?"

And boy was it a trip.

I actually finished the cut on the stroke of midnight and spent another half hour doing the end credits.

After that I clicked 'render', let the screensaver run and hit up equal doses of Dino Crisis, Silent Hill and Tony Hawk 3 (for those of you who aren't regulars, yes, I just got me a PS1).

Two hours later I discovered that the movie, finally rendered, would take up 17 gigabytes.

The rub? The partition of my hard drive I was saving it to only had 16 gigabytes. This left the movie partially incomplete, split into four chapters and a fifth chapter still not rendered. Bugger. I rejigged everything, noticed a few mistakes I skimped over before, fixed them and re-rendered (a long and tedious process).

Two hours later it was finally done and I could finally burn it to DVD... or so I thought. For some reason, Nero crashed everytime I tried to burn the movie. I tried changing settings, flipping bits around and, after another 3 hours (I think) I finally got it to start burning the movie. The only catch is it has to have a menu now, and the menu has to be devoid of any text or pictures, just thumbnails of the movie.

Not the most user friendly menu, now is it?

At some point I fell asleep at my desk and woke up to the sound of my phone. Then I went back to my parents' house to shower and change, went back to The Hive, realized I didn't have my keys, went back to my parents' house to pick the keys up, back to The Hive just as the DVD finished burning and ejected the disc out and from there it was a two hour traffic jam through Kuala Lumpur. I arrived at the office at 12.45pm, got straight into work, called up UPS the second things slowed down and now I am here, typing all this to you, hardly any sleep, tons of caffeine running through my body, a migraine waiting to happen and a mad rush of office work as well as trying to prepare my entry forms and what have you for the Seattle International Film Festival. The courier will be here at 5.00pm. Only problem is there's an office party at 4.30pm (which I am inclined to skip).

But it's done. It's watchable. All it needs now are tune-ups here and there, audio clean-up, some colour correction and grading as well as some private screening comments before I unleash it to the world.

That is, if anyone will screen the fucker. Saiful's trying to sort out a screening, possibly at the Alliance Francais. Either there or the HELP Auditorium. Considering that's where my last two short films premiered it would be nice to premiere my feature there too.

...

Bloody hell, I'm knackered. I want egg sandwiches.