Mitusents

Not proud to report the same old / same old with respect to the Treasure Hunt disks, but there it is.  My wife has had the same issue with the authoring software as I was having (though with essentially no cursing, yelling or destruction – imagine that), to wit finding it (so far) impossible to get the software to do what it’s purported to be designed to do.  She has suggested buying a copy thinking, magically, to my mind, that the paid version will somehow work properly, but I’m quite skeptical and have resisted her suggestion.  It seems so simple, yet has proven so difficult.  At least I understand why others are charging $500+ to do this – I’d sure as hell do so after going through such a painful learning curve.

And then there’s this idea that’s captured my mind: re-edit the movie to improve the deficiencies that are clogging up my mental pathways when it comes time to consider selling disks or promoting VOD, etc.  E.g., monetizing it.  I finally found an editor who would consider taking all or part of his compensation on speculation, meaning if the re-edited version sold then he’d get paid.  We negotiated for a $100 sample for a couple of select scenes and I made available the around 8 GB of raw video files, dialog and sound files.  A week later he gave me his version.

Yeah, about that…  I like to write chatty scripts that, shockingly, produce chatty raw video.  He didn’t like my chattiness and cut what I originally had as a bit more than 4 minutes into a smidge more than 2.  Were he to continue that trend for the whole flick (I have to think yes), my already short 60 minute feature would be trimmed to a no-longer feature-length 30 minutes.  My wife liked his use of the music, though, and we all agreed his day-for-night was less bad than mine.  However, after some consideration and discussion with another movie making friend, I decided to pass.

Coincidentally (or not), a day or two later I found a guy on Reddit who was interested in doing some color correction for free.  I made my original version available for him to play with and a day or two ago got his version of the same scene.  Since he wasn’t re-editing, the focus was entirely on the look of the day-for-night.  After queuing up my version and his for a side-by-side comparison, frankly, I don’t see any difference.  We haven’t really communicated since then, so I don’t know if he’s decided I’m not worth the effort or if he’s going to try something else.  My movie-making friend had some suggestions and I thought to make a couple (and experimented myself as well), but it seems, unless I hear back, this approach may be dead in the water.

I’ll be encouraging my wife to try some other authoring software, hoping that, possibly, going through the learning curve with something else will jog loose the required elements to finally get this ‘simple’ task done. Then I can finally get my owesies to those that helped fund the flick through their donations.  I thank them for their patience.

The Shopping Queen (wife) got me a frame for the Treasure Hunt poster earlier this week and I put it in the other day.  It looks great!  I’d show you a picture of the poster, but after failing to capture something that didn’t look like crap, we gave up.  Now I have to decide where to hang it.

When it comes to shopping, she’s awesome.  But she’s proved to be about as diligent at working on the disk authoring as I have been.  She promises she’ll work on it this weekend, though, and, so far as I know, we have little scheduled for this weekend, so hopefully she’ll be able to make some progress.  That being said, the artist who has been working with me on the disk labels and cover art has been going through a rough time (divorce, she said) and hasn’t got the finished art to me yet.  I told her we weren’t, yet, waiting on her and to take extra time if she needed it.

So, finally some measurable incremental progress on Treasure Hunt: the posters have arrived.  I’d take a picture of the poster, but that seems rather absurd, since you can see exactly what was printed at the link above.

That being said, it seems my wife is about as focused as I have been on authoring the disks, which is to say, not.  I’ll be nagging her about it again today (she promised to work on it over the weekend, though we were busy with a couple of minor disasters).  If she can’t make time, I may ask a niece or nephew if they can try their hand at it.  Perhaps, since their brains are less ossified, they can figure it out easily.

So my artist has worked up disk labels as well as a cover for the DVD case.  Which is good.  But I’m still baffled by this authoring software.  I’ve roped my wife in, who has extraordinary common sense and at least 100x more patience than I have, so am cautiously optimistic that we’ll have something soon.

I did decide that Windows was the way to go. Since my wife had been complaining that her old Windows laptop wasn’t getting the job done any more, we went and got a new one.  On the one hand you could view that as an expense related to Treasure Hunt, since that’s what prompted the purchase, but on the other hand, she’s been wanting to get a new laptop for a while now (I think the old one is close to 4-5 years old).  I’m going to go with ‘not,’ in relation to the Treasure Hunt budget, because it makes me feel better.  Hollywood accounting.

Windows is as aggravating as I remember and it’s taken a while to adjust enough to use it for longer than a few minutes at a time without yelling curses.  I tried a couple of different software packages, but am either an incompetent moron (likely the case, at least when it comes to Windows; I stopped caring about it after XP) or the packages are defective in some way or another, as I couldn’t get a couple to install and another was so obscure I couldn’t figure out how to do even the most simple tasks.

‘Interestingly,’ as I researched authoring software, the rule seems to be really expensive, as I found one package that sold for $10,000 and another for $3,000.  It would seem that there is room for something simple to operate, but I have too many other things to do to take on that task, even if it might be profitable.  But that’s how low I sunk – before I thought to ask my wife to get involved – figuring it was going to be easier for me to learn all the protocols and do it myself.

I. Hate. Computers.

So, meaningless palaver or reason for optimism?  In any case, one down, three to go.

Dear Keith,

Thank you for your submission to Skyline Indie Film Fest 2019. I regret to inform you that your submission, Shenandoah Treasure Hunt, was not selected for this year’s competition.

Our screeners and readers are consistently impressed by the high standard of filmmaking and writing we’ve had the privilege to view this season. Please know that a rejection from festival programming this year is not necessarily a reflection on quality. We are a small festival with small venues and therefore can only screen a limited number of film blocks. Please be advised that we may contact you in the event that other programming falls through or more screening time becomes available.

We greatly respect the effort that went into creating your film or writing your script and thank you for your participation in our festival.

Thank you so much for sharing your work with us. We wish you all the best.

OK, the artist is back from vacation, I’m back from vacation, I’ve recovered from the vacation (still suffering from some weird health issue that is apparently not cardiac related, at least according to my ‘nuclear stress test’) and last night actually stopped dilly dallying.  I figured, hey, I can create the DVD/Blu-ray disk images without any disks, burners, cases or labels, so stop procrastinating.

Except then I either couldn’t install the software I’d earlier selected or it was so unuser friendly to be useless to me, so a couple of hours of frustration later I finally gave up on my cherished Linux.  It would appear that the Linux community attaches no value to disks, so won’t collectively lift a finger to make decent software.  I even got so desperate to search again for authoring services and was briefly encouraged when I found one that would do it for $99.  Except when I read the fine print I realized to get the final product I needed I was back to $350-400.

I’m going to try one last thing.  My wife has a Windows laptop and I’m going to try the authoring software there and see what happens.  I sure hope that works, I’m running out of options and have no idea what to do next.

On a totally unrelated note: several relatives have recently watched Treasure Hunt.  At first I was quite encouraged by their interest, until I started to hear them talk amongst themselves.  It seems they spent the majority of the movie eagerly trying to guess which house each scene was filmed in rather than the actual story or plot, so the little confidence that I got when I heard they enjoyed it was dashed.

That being said, a very critical friend of mine has been pushing me to consider the effort to sell the movie.  He’s convinced it has a relatively easy audience, since it is about college students, treasure hunts and Civil War.  While I’ve pretty much decided to base that final decision on the results of the festivals I applied to, I did give the idea some thought.  The first biggest issue is I’ve been lazy and not got releases from all the actors, musicians and locations. In principle, those are easy things to fix, are ‘free’ in that it just takes effort on my part, and are highly likely to be granted without any issue.  The second biggest issue is I lack confidence in my editing ability and would really like to have the flick re-edited by a professional.  That, though, takes money.  Money I’m reluctant to put in myself, let alone my decision-making boss.  I have toyed with the idea of trying to find an editor that would take the work on with compensation through any sales that result, but am not convinced I could find a suitably qualified person to do the work on that gamble.

Indecision, it’s a terrible thing…

I’m sorry to sound like a broken record (can that phrase be used any longer?) in saying I haven’t got the disks made for Treasure Hunt yet, but that’s exactly what’s happened.  My ‘excuse’ this time is the disk cover/art isn’t ready.  I’m pretty sure I can craft something for the disk case, but I need something round and designed to be useful with a hole in the middle.  The good news is the artist who crafted the poster has also made such things.  The bad news is she’s been on vacation the last couple of weeks.  The worse news is now I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks.  Thus, it’ll be July before I have a chance to get these things done.

Once again, I have to apologize for allowing myself to get distracted and not get the disks/posters made for Treasure Hunt.  I did get the poster artist to reformat the height/width to fit the promised size, so that tiny incremental progress has been made.  I looked into disk duplication long ago, found the prices to my liking, then, apparently, failed to keep record of my research.  So I started the process over again only this time learning that making commercial-quality DVDs or Blurays is a two step process. First is ‘authoring’ the master, which is the creation of the menus, formatting the files properly and creating the final digital file that’s set up for reading as a DVD or Bluray.  Then the file is replicated on the various disks.  For a couple of bucks a piece, at volume.

Not exactly sure how I so thoroughly managed to drop that ball, but there it is.  Now knowing about this two steps, I do some research and find out that authoring is really expensive, particularly for just a handful of disks.  Around $500 each (DVD and Bluray; actually, Bluray is a bit more expensive).  That threw a substantial monkey wrench into the work – if I went with paid authoring I’d have blown through almost all the funds I raised!

OK, so now I start to research how to author the masters myself.  Preliminary indications are this is feasible, but I’m not getting a huge warm-and-fuzzy that the free Linux versions are going to be painless.  Now I need a Bluray burner (my computer has a DVD burner built in), disks, the cases for the disks and ways to produce the art for the covers.  I hate to say this, but it’ll most likely take me another couple of weeks to get all this done.  I rather hoped to put the production onto someone experienced, but it seems it once again falls back on me to power through the learning curve.