48HFP 2012, Day 3

Saturday 06:00 – November 3rd, 2012

Our dear editor, who was planning to leave sometime around midnight so that he could get some sleep before reporting for work on Saturday, was still with us. Pots and pots of coffee, mini-naps taken while some transitions were rendering and a gritty determination to finish a job he had started saw him through. By the time he left, the video edit was complete! Only the music and some sound effects needed to be blended in, and the credits. Simple, right?

One of the team members had managed to rope in a friend to come in and help with the music. He was scheduled to arrive by 10:00. I decided to catch some sleep. I think I must have dozed off around 07:30 and woke up at 10:30 to start work on the music. I wasn't the only one though, sleepless nights abound during the 48Hfp.

The friend turned out to be a whiz, and he locked down the music in a matter of hours. However, it was a laborious task for me to start laying in the music into the timeline as I was very concerned about mucking something up in the edit. The thing was, our editor was comfortable on one software, and I had previously worked on another. So I had to negotiate a new software more or less from scratch. However, we had sufficient time, or so we thought.

In spite of constant remonstrations from the team that we needed to get things moving, I very gingerly went about fixing the music. By around 17:00 we had the film complete. Now all that remained was to add the credits. Not wanting to take a chance, I fixed the credits in the software I was comfortable in, rendered it separately and imported it into the main timeline. We were ready to export our film on to the disk by 18:00. The dead line was 19:30 and the drive would not take more than 15-20 minutes. A trial export we had done of the rough cut in the morning hadn’t taken more than 15 minutes including transferring to a flashdrive so, we had time!

I exported the file and sat back in relief; only to receive a message: “General Error (39)”. Pardon my French, par apni to phati!

Frantic calls were made to all and sundry. Advice streamed in from everywhere as to what should be done. But nothing worked! We decided to send out one team member with the rough cut—just in case. He raced to the elevator, only for it not to work  as well. Murphy’s law was on us with a vengeance! He raced down 11 floors via the staircase and made his way to the submission point. He called along the way warning of a traffic snarl. Never a break!

Meanwhile, I was trying to stay calm and go through everything systematically. Turned out all I needed to do was render the timeline in-program before exporting. And I did, and the film finally started exporting to disc. When we were done, the whole team was ready to dart off. It was past 18:30 and we were running out of time. None of us wanted the rough-cut submitted. I still thought we should give ourselves another 10 minutes, to watch the film before submission. Just in case.

And sure enough, some of the music hadn’t rendered! When I investigated, it turned out I had made the mistake of importing the music directly from the flash drive. Thus, in the rush to get the rough edit out, some of the flash drive connections had severed.

I methodically re-imported the music files, saved them on to the hard disk and re-connected the music links into the edit timeline. This took precious minutes, and the entire team was waiting with bated breath. To stay calm at this time, with so much on the line, was perhaps my single toughest task in all the 48 hours that were so close to elapsing.

Final render and export and transfer to flash drive happened at around 18:55. The lifts were now working and as the team hurtled towards the submission point, (in separate cars, each with a flash drive—just in case) we saw that the traffic too had cleared up.

The storm clouds were finally dispersing, and the sun was shining brightly upon us. Well, figuratively at least, it was past twilight otherwise.

And at 19:20, we had touchdown. Absolutelynoscope presented its short film “Ebb & Flow” to the organizers of the Dubai 48 Hour Film Project 2012 on time.

I think a tweet by one of the team members early on in the 48 hours summed up our journey best: “@trulydj: Genre is Romance! We need to wrap up this romance in 48 hrs... Looks like the reality of today.”

And wrap it in 48 hours we did, just about! But I suspect our romance with this little film may continue for longer.