Thursday the 30th. Just a few short days after my last post. Well I wanted to try and post a little more often to keep everything up to date and also to try and make sure that I actually had made progress to post about… So here is an update.

On Monday morning I went to work. on Monday night despite being tired and not really wanting to I made sure that I filmed footage for Babysitter. Then I went to capture the footage… and I had my first problem. From time to time one of the pins in my fire-wire port on my camera gets bent or pushed back or something and it doesn’t work right. well after an hour or so of messing with it I got it to work. I captured the footage and went to move some files around so that I had all the files I needed on the Laptop Hard drive… so that I don’t have to have the progressively more temperamental hard drive hooked up ect. And well the sometimes uncooperative external hard drive- staged a revolt against me. The computer sees it, recognizes that 412GIG is used… but REFUSES to show any of the files.

SO, all of my raw footage for Babysitter and other projects along with YEARS worth of files is being held hostage. I am currently DESPERATELY trying to retrieve some of the most important files… everything else can wait… But this just goes to show that whenever I make a big push to do something… something has to go horribly wrong. I decided to really pull out all of the stops, no more excuses - finish Babysitter and release it on Amazon and get myself onto IMDB.com finally, and right on cue: catastrophic hard drive failure.

Anyway, I am working to get stuff back on track - I still want to try and get things finished by my birthday… but it just might be impossible. As per usual I will need all the luck I can get.

UPDATE! Ok it is now something like 8 hours later. I have run some software and it seems like I can copy the files I need from the non-working hard drive onto another hard drive and they all seem to work fine… the problem is that there is very limited space on the other hard drive so basically I can only copy exactly what I need, and then maybe burn some DVD’s as a back up… If I were to try and back everything up to DVD’s I’d need like 100 DVD’s. So anyway… I have some long hard work ahead of me but it looks like everything is back on track!

Well I am headed home today, at some point… I have two job sites I have to visit before I actually get there but at least it is money. I haven’t totaled it up yet but I think that this is going to be the first 40 hour paycheck in months. And it is looking like next week is going to be somewhat busy too… let us hope that this is the start of us crawling out of the hole. There is a long way to go but I am determined - I have plans, not unreasonable ones either, I will get my movies out there and build my credit - with better credit I can finally get better equipment, make better movies and make more money. That’s the idea anyway.

I have done almost every single little thing I could on Babysitter as planned. Hopefully I can get more footage filmed and captured while I am home, then next week out on the road again I can repeat the success of this week. That is what I have to do if I am to stay on target.

Well, here I am back “out on the road” for the first real time in months. There has been the occasional night or two away here and there but this is a full week away from home. After the less than 100% successful month I had alone at home while my wife hand delivered the news of her current state of pregnancy to my parents in England I have tried to hit the grindstone hard.

The one thing (not household repair related) that I did get done during that month was to film one Insert and ADR shot to fix ONE of the slight problems I have with The Babysitter. It has been very hard trying to find ways to replace footage or alter footage when the lead actress has not been available. But anyway… I filmed one shot to inter-cut and help with the editing of this one scene and right before going away on this trip I captured it along with other replacement footage I filmed a few months ago. SO I am completely up to date with footage captured and in the last three days I have worked on three effects shots.

I am going to try and get everything I can done before I get home from this trip leaving me with just the final couple of shots I need to film with a body double, the final tightening edit and music… which I might have to start from scratch because of my complete computer failure from a couple of months ago.

Long story short: I have made more progress in the past 4 days then I have in the past 4 months, I aim to try and have Babysitter finalized by my birthday at the latest. Ready for an official release before Halloween this year! Wish me luck people.

As I was just sitting here trying to think of a title for this post and where to begin I had a little idea… I was thinking about what I could say about my progress in things since my last post, and I thougt about it like this:

My progress lately seems to be like watching a progress bar on a computer when you are on dial-up when everything else seems to be on high-speed. Things have been painfully slow, work has continued with a frustrating string of 1 and 2 (mostly 1) day jobs that bring in very little money but suck up large amounts of time. If I had my work permit I would have been looking for another job because it is getting very tiring. Despite all of the annoying and frustrating day jobs I have managed to almost finish all of my responsibilities at home (things are progressing on schedule) AND I have worked on at least two things that I can genuinely say needed doing. I have edited some more of Random Acts and filmed a pick-up shot for The Babysitter. I still have not been able to get the lead actress to even return my call, and this was not even something originally on the re-shoot schedule but it is something that needed doing and actually fixes part of a scene that I would not have been able to fix even with a body double. wow that was long winded and over complicated… much like me - but anyway, work has been done, work continues and I am determined one way or another to get everything finished this year.

I think I have said the same thing for the last couple of years but this time I really believe it, over the last couple of months I have had ideas for ways to fix scenes that I had previously thought to be un-fixable and this has really encouraged me, things may not ever be perfect but despite incredible personal hardship right now - I know I can do it. (But wish me luck anyway, just in case)