Memphis wrap-up.

I was up 'til 6:30 Thursday morning working on the Interplanetary edit. At that point, I was probably more working on the sound mix, but whatever. I went to bed, planning to get up a couple of hours later to head down to Production Plus to get the DigiBeta tape made...

...and woke up around 11. Apparently, I slept right through the alarm. Exhaustion will do that to you. Stacey couldn't get me on the phone and came home to check on me. She had to shake me a little while to rouse me from my slumber. Luckily, there had been a miscommunication with Production Plus, and I was scheduled for 1 p.m., not 9 a.m.

The dub to DigiBeta went great until reel five, when about twenty seconds of footage played back totally out of whack. I ran home and found that when I'd reconnected the Final Cut Pro timeline to the HD footage, I got reels 83 and 83a (no idea why I have a reel 83a) mixed up. I re-rendered the bad footage, and the guys at Production Plus were able to do an insert edit to tape, so we didn't have to re-dub the whole movie.



John and I finally got on the road to Memphis around 5 p.m. (yay, rush hour) and arrived there around 9:30 p.m. after getting lost a couple of times, distracted from the road by good conversation. We found Erik Jambor at a bar eating a late dinner, but John and I couldn't buy drinks because of the bar's cash-only policy. So we walked to another bar, used their ATM, and returned to have a drink with Jambor. As John said, longest beer run ever.

Jambor introduced us to a couple of fest folks, and they recommended we hit a late night place for PBR and food. The place was kind of like Marty's (a favorite Birmingham night spot), and we enjoyed sandwiches with sides of Pringles chips.

I spent most of the rest of the weekend on the verge of vomiting. There was such a rush to get the Memphis cut together, I was afraid I might have made a serious mistake (like leaving out the dialog for an entire scene or something). With no way to watch the DigiBeta tape (why don't hotels have DigiBeta machines in each room?), I wouldn't know of any problems with the cut until the screening. And if the DigiBeta tape had exploded for some reason, we didn't have a backup (John and I planned to make a backup, but I left a near irreplaceable cable at home, so we couldn't burn a DVD from my FireWire drive).

Needless to say, I was a little anxious about how the screening would go down.

I managed to calm down long enough Saturday to watch My Effortless Brilliance (another movie Ted Speaker wrote music for), a couple of shorts, and part of a live panel discussion featuring Craig Brewer and Elvis Mitchell.

By the time midnight rolled around, there was a large Birmingham contingent in town for the movie (people had been filing in since Friday afternoon, when Stacey, Kelly Marshall, Sam Frazier, and Michael arrived). So I was even more nervous. How much would it suck to let down somebody who drove four hours to see a movie? But I was really glad all these people made the trip (on top of all their other contributions to Interplanetary).

The screening itself is kind of a blur. I'd had a few beers at this point and was so relieved to see the movie looking and sounding good in an honest-to-goodness movie theater, the thing just flew by. I did notice people laughing at some bits that I hadn't considered super funny, so that was nice. I like when different parts of a movie work for different viewers.

After a little post-screening partying and a little sleep, Stacey took Hilleke back home, and John and I stopped back by the festival theater to bid adieu to Jambor. We got a little lost one more time before we made it back to Highway 78 and, eventually, Birmingham.