The first stage of post-production is organizing and importing all the footage into our editing machine, a Dual 2.5 Ghz Mac G5 with Final Cut Pro. It took nearly a whole week, importing a couple hours a night, to import all the footage from 12 MiniDV tapes. That’s 12 hours worth of video, stored nicely on its own 250GB external drive. At the end, there is still about 128 GB left to play around with. And that space will be needed for the render files as the editing progresses.

Because of the sheer volume, I didn’t watch much of the video as it imported. I pull down 20 minutes at a time, which means if there is an import error, I don’t lose more than 20 minutes of time. When you’re out on the field, jostling the camera around in the woods, there are bound to be some breaks in timecode. Overall, I found about a dozen glitches with the footage shot on the Canon GL1 that stopped the process. The XL1 footage came through without a hitch. 

Still, 12 tapes for a weekend shoot is a huge volume for this relatively small project. By comparison, all the footage shot for Rock Paper Scissors - a full-length feature shot over 3 months and coming in at about 81 minutes - filled only 8 MiniDV tapes. Part of that is due to the documentary nature of Weekend Warlords. Since you never know when something worthy is going to happen, you have to keep rolling most of the time. Plus, we had a lot of interviews. Still, from what I saw, we probably didn’t need to shoot so much. You never know this stuff until after it’s done.

I only mention this because I am a huge believer in shooting little more than is absolutely necessary. Of course, this is easier on a planned shoot - when you’re shooting from a script. You shoot the main scenes from your planned angles a few times, then at least a few bits from other angles to cover yourself in case you need it. Then you shoot some random closeups to help with the editing. Too much footage overwhelms — might seem like a good idea at the time (tape is cheap, after all), but it’s exponentially more difficult to wade through all that crap just to find the good shots. 

Couple that with my philosophy that limits actually encourage creativity. You’ll see I’m not really looking forward to week 2, which involves sorting out all this footage - separating it into shots and labeling each one. But alas, the show must go on, and we now enter the second week. Welcome to the late nights. Stay tuned…

With Artists’ Essentials in the can and selling well, we can now focus on finishing up our next project, Weekend Warlords. In case you haven’t been following, this is a short-subject documentary we shot in April down a long, winding road a ways outside of Warrensburg, Missouri. We spent two days and nights camping in the wilderness for Gates of Summer, a yearly Dagorhir event that is well-attended, with participants from all corners of the country. Instead of explaining the sport of Dagorhir again, I just ought to point you to these websites about the phenomena:

dagorhir.com

Dominion of the Unconquered Sun 

After a couple false-starts with faulty equipment, we’re ready to press on full-steam ahead into the editing phase. I’m feeding footage into my computer right now. Our goal is to have this finished by the next Gates of Summer event, coming up in a few months. The DVD will, naturally, be loaded with extras. 

And, as long promised, to kick off the post-production, I’ve posted a bunch of pictures from that long-lost weekend in April in a brand-new gallery. Just follow this link: Weekend Warlords gallery

You also might want to check out the articles we wrote about this last Spring here and here. Stay tuned for more info on the progress!

It’s finally finished — all three Arists’ Essentials DVDs are complete, as pictured above. I’ve shipped more than 35 sets away to our folks who have preordered, and the word coming back is overwhelmingly positive. Donna is taking them to workshops and meetings and seems to sell another set or two every time.

The last two weeks have been crazy — why did it have to fall over the holidays? — as I’ve been printing DVDs, burning them, slipping them in Donna’s fantastic covers and shipping them out. It was slow at first, but then again this is my first attempt at mass production. Eventually, we would like to send these off to a printer to do all the work for us, but to minimize risk and expense, we decided to do the first few batches ourselves. There are now about 45 of these sets in circulation and they’re already picking up a nice word-of-mouth buzz.

It’s been a year and two months from beginning to end, concept to delivery. I can’t say it’s been much of a struggle, although there have definitely been a few frustrating moments between the both of us. Donna has tweaked and fiddled with the covers like crazy, and I’ve been designing and redesigning the DVDs, adding menus items, changing the structure, adding titles, etc. That’s because we’ve been relentless in soliciting feedback from Donna’s close circle of artist friends who have helped and encouraged us to polish the final project.

It usually takes a new project to motivate me to do something new. It’s been a year since we started this journey — from concept to completion — and I, for one, feel like I know all the ins and outs of the DVD format by now.  Maybe that’s because we’ve added so many goodies to this set that we had to pull out a few tricks to make everything work on the technical side. It’s great to finally see this job literally "pay off" for us.

Speaking of which, I have to say we’re reconsidering our pricing scheme. The content is so good, and it’s so feature rich, that we’re beginning to wonder if we’re selling ourselves short. So if you’re even considering owning a set for yourself, you may want to wander over to www.artistsessentials.com and order a set, because the price may be going up soon. 

Now, I can finally move on to the next project waiting in the wings: Editing the documentary we shot last April. I’ll kick it off by posting some goodies next week. Things are starting to get interesting at red40, so bookmark this site and stay tuned!