The not neverending story

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About 3 years ago we (which means either the company I work for, or me and my wife) set upon making a documentary. A film, which was big in ambition and – being an unknown production company – small in budget. Now, we are finally drawing to a close. After numerous re-edits, re-shoots and re-thoughts, tomorrow we’ll show a sort-of final cut to 2 financeers.

The last weeks have been quite, er, busy. For me that meant a lot of graphics work, mixing, finding music, finding sounds, finding stills, clearing rights, finding archive footage, clearing rights again, transferring everything into FCP, colour correcting, chosing colour schemes and filters, making backups, fixing hardware hic-ups, and so on. My wife did, as always, a glorious editing job.

The other day, after a day of fixing some glitches in the footage, I came home to my lovely daughters. When Eva (1 1/4 years old) showed me her tongue, and I saw some white stuff on it, my first thought was “now which filter do I use to fix that one?”. I knew I needed a brake.

Long hours over a stretched period of time and creativity just don’t mix. Even though it may be tempting to work “just one more hour” (which usually means working till afer midnight), it is better to resist and get some off-time. Ease yourself with the knowledge that your brain will keep working on the problem anyway, and the next day you’ll easily find a fix for a previous impossible problem.