Wow, what a long strange trip this has been. Treasure Hunt is finito, insofar as I have no intention to make any other changes, unless it’s a technical thing. John, the writer/director who helped me with the sound, pointed out a brief scene where one of the actor’s microphone recorder is clearly visible in his back pocket (there, I’ve gone and narrowed the ‘Easter egg‘ search by by half). There are a number of other scenes where, if you know exactly where to look, the microphone boom is clearly visible, but they’re at night scenes, so they don’t stand out.
Nothing has been without pain, though. Vimeo wouldn’t take my payment via Firefox (and hasn’t responded to my email complaining about it), but I eventually tried Chrome and that worked. When rendering the trailer I had two parts in different frames per second (no idea how the heck that happened), but if I tried to change one part to match the other, the editor changed all the begin/end points for all the video and audio clips. Eventually I tried rendering the parts separately and then rerendering them together, a PITA, but a fast one in comparison to the whole movie. Naturally, the first time I did this I wound up with part of the audio truncated. No idea what happened, but repeating the entire process all over again got it to work properly.
Now I’m trying to establish an IMDB page for the flick. It seems actual humans are involved in the decision making process, so who knows how long it will be until that happens. I did create an IMDB page for myself:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10491242/
Hopefully once the movie is accepted I’ll actually get some credits. The image looks stretched, but I compared it to the original and it seems correct.
I still have plenty of work yet to do. I need to go through the ~700 minutes of footage to pull out 5-10 minute’s worth of bloopers and outtakes, then get the young lady who did some behind-the-scenes filming to either finish her edit or give me the raw material so I can edit, then get the Bluray and DVDs pressed and finally print the posters. Well, I guess the final, final thing is to send those things to the people who supported the movie through the crowdfunding.
And there’s promotion and festivals… Sigh, now I’m tired again.
This was a veritable emotional roller coaster and there were many times I was sure I never wanted to do this again. However, I feel very good about the final product and I believe I can do a better job as a director (and even writer) next time, so am all set to begin the journey all over again. Tentatively titled “Domestique,” it’s the story of the rank and file on a pro road cycling team. It’s something I think I can get a full budget for and profitable distribution without the typical crapshoot of conventional sales and distribution. It’ll be another long trek. I first started writing Treasure Hunt almost exactly a year ago. My goal is to film Domestique next summer, but first I have to get it written (I have a detailed synopsis already), get it funded (my wife/boss/executive producer made it clear no more retirement money), assemble cast and crew, film it then edit it. Except this time, I’m looking forward to the process instead of a little bit dreading it on Treasure Hunt.
Here’s the trailer. Direct link: https://vimeo.com/318462063
