It’s 4:30 AM, and most of our team has gone to sleep after a nice little celebration at Maxwell’s in nearby Kimball Junction.  But Derek and Mike are still awake, tweaking audio, and I’m awake too, blogging about them.  It’s a pleasantly quiet moment after a very hectic month.  Mike and I are sipping herbal tea.  Derek runs on pure, unadulterated perfectionism.

I know Mike said we wouldn’t tweak after midnight, but as it turns out, we can’t help it.  We’re proud of this movie, and with all the work that’s gone into it already, we just can’t see our way clear to falling short in the home stretch.  (Well, okay, technically we’re past the home stretch.  But you get my point.)  The plan is to get the film into decent shape in the next ten minutes or so, then start exporting a QuickTime version of it, then go to bed while the computer does its work.  We can still make a few minor audio changes tomorrow, but the picture will be locked.  And then at 9 PM, we screen it!  That’s going to be very surreal …

So have we failed?  If we make changes after midnight, even if it’s just smoothing out audio, is that admitting defeat?  Do we have to re-brand ourselves as The Twenty-Eight-and-a-Half-Day Feature?  You’ll have to decide for yourself.  Obviously, I wish we really had been able to cease all work at the stroke of twelve and still feel good about the finished product.  But in the end, I think it would have been a disservice to ourselves and to the audience to be too uptight about the deadline.  So call us frauds.  Call us cheats.  Call us liars.  But come see our movie anyway!  Because it’s gonna be pretty damn good.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video of Mike and me trying to make coherent speeches while giddy and sleep-deprived:

-KB

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 at 7:27 am and is filed under Keith Boynton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.