The Impossible Dream

Though I live a thousand years, I will never make another video. This project is the worst. It's wasting all the time I ought to be spending on work. I'd skyve off on it, but it's worth my whole grade in that class. So, even if it proves the end of me, I have to finish. I spent most of last night working through the rest of the clips--I've only got three more to go. That's still a fair amount of work, but considering there were twenty to start with, three doesn't seem so bad. One of the three is very short, too--just a little cutaway shot of a bowling ball (well, a lampshade that looks a little like a bowling-ball, anyway) falling on my head. I have to edit out my right arm so it isn't so obvious I'm dropping it on my own head.

I got up quite late today, at one o'clock. I would have got to work right then, but there was a Clint Eastwood movie on the telly. They're having 24 hours of Clint Eastwood movies on channel forty-seven today. I've already seen most of them, but I hadn't seen 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'. This simply had to be rectified: I've got weaknesses for both Mr. Eastwood and bad old Westerns. The combination was too tempting to resist. Of course, now I want to paint cowboys on spur-gashed old horses and I can't, because I have to work.

Fortunately, I managed to get most of my cleaning done yesterday afternoon. All I've got left to do, on that front, is pick up the last few books from the floor, scrub the kitchen counters (they're not so much dirty as dusty from disuse), and take the garbage down to the recycling room. Once I've got all my packing done, and all my schoolwork (the video's the last of that), then all there is left to do is work. There's that one damn commission I'm still plugging away at, and the rest of the greyscale paintings. If I don't do anything else, and if my health holds up, I can get three to five done a week, which will get most of the Misguided Games project out of the way before I leave. I'm still hoping to get all of it done, somehow, but that might be an impossible dream.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get my video finished tonight or tomorrow. Once I've got all the clips edited, all there is left to do is work out the transitions between them, put them all together in one big file, and add either subtitles or a soundtrack. My computer is not co-operating on the sound front (of course), so it looks like it's going to be the former. I think I've got the file-to-VHS problem sorted, in theory, at least. In practice, there is one tiny problem: my VCR. It's ancient. It doesn't have an S-video outlet. I don't know what I'm going to do about that. I wonder if there isn't some way to get it onto a hi-8 tape in my camcorder (which is already attached to my computer), then from that tape onto a regular videotape? I have the A/V cable to connect the camcorder to the VCR. so if I could just.... Anyway, I'll work all that out later. For now, I've got to concentrate on finishing the thing. It really is terrible so far, and maybe a little amusing, in a "What the fuck is THAT?" sort of way. Plan 9 from Outer Space has nothing on the gruesome ineptitude of this flick.

Anyway, back to the Photoshop salt mines with me and my shameful camera work. This is probably going to be the first non-pornographic movie shot entirely on someone's living-room couch.