Indie filmmaking can suck. It’s hard as hell for very little reward. Sometimes you just have days that make you want to break. When the work you put into it just doesn’t seem worth it. When everything goes wrong and it feels like the whole project is imploding. Every indie filmmaker has these kind of days. I talk a bit about this on tonight’s cast, but the Outpost Doom screening this past Saturday was, in my view, a disaster. A bunch of stuff went wrong and because of that we’ve had to hunker down for the next few days in order to get it fixed in time for the Drunken Zombie Film Festival.

I gotta admit, I was pretty down on Saturday. Being embarrassed and angry at every technical issue that happened during the screening contributed to myself getting drunk on scotch (Jeremy is a terrible influence. He corrupts innocence). And when I woke up today, knowing that it was going to be an incredibly tedious day, and not wanting at all to deal with fixing this movie, I can honestly say I thought it couldn’t be salvaged. And in fact, I was pretty pissy all day long.

I’ll give props to Jeff, though. Dude just made me happy when we recorded the Splattercast. It was nice to take a break after 8 hours straight of staring at laptop monitors. There’s something to be said about a nice person just getting your mind off of shit every once in a while. Big hug to you, Jeff. Then, we get back to work on the movie and the final stuff goes incredibly smoothly. We knock out the final edits in no time at all and finish before midnight, which was our goal at the beginning of the day.

Even though I was in a much better mood after the Splattercast and after how quickly the final edits were done, I was still skeptical until we added up the running time. I literally spent over 10 hours cutting the film and then supervising those same cuts a second time. It was incredibly draining and I was worried that this entire day had been wasted. My goal was to cut 15 minutes off the runtime of the film, getting it to 85 minutes. The final tally, after all cuts had been made, was 86 minutes, just one minute off my goal (and that was after leaving in several scenes that I personally just loved but was afraid I’d have to cut for time and pacing issues). So after the hell of today, a day in which it felt absolutely nothing was being accomplished and which I just generally began the day in a shitty mood…we hit on everything we wanted to do.

Tomorrow, starting bright and early, we’ll be doing what no doubt will be another hellishly long day focusing on nothing but audio, which was the major problem during Saturday’s screening. At least I know that when I wake up, I’ll be much more positive about us being able to fix the problems than I was yesterday. In the end, maybe Saturday’s disastrous screening was a blessing in disguise. Better to witness all the faults in front of an audience of friends and family than to have it happen during the DZFF. Gives us a second chance, in a way.  Oh, and we have almost decided to change a major aesthetic of the film for numerous reasons that I’ll explain on next week’s Splattercast. Can you figure it out?

Filed under: Dead Lantern News, Outpost Doom