My Mother's Song

At about 4am this morning, I sat in front of my MacBook Pro watching my war movie slowly render. The render really only took about 30 seconds, but it felt like an hour. My brain was deceived by fatigue! I was tempted to take another day off, but I knew that this would not be a possibility, being that this was a short week and all. When my render completed, I felt relieved that the rough cut was complete. ROUGH CUT. It was 4am in the morning and I only had a rough cut. I really wanted to finish this project. Professor Donn always says that this class is all about workflow and that he would prefer that we submit an unfinished project rather than not turning in anything at all. However, I had reached the point of no return, and the last thing I wanted was to submit an underendered file. So I stayed up for the next hour to tweak my project. By 5:30am, my eyes shut down and I passed out on my bed with my glasses on. I woke up three hours later to complete the project. I finished by 10am and headed into work.


I'll be honest and say that I wasn't completely wowed by this final product. It was definitely 99% there, but there was something about it that really bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on it in the morning, but when I screened it in class later, it hit me: the required elements were thrown in just to fulfill the assignment. Professor Donn shared the same sentiment. I explained that I really did throw it in just to have it. He told me to remove them. This was such a relief because I really wanted play by the rules, but I was really on to something with this piece. Now that I got the official ok to get rid of the bowl of strawberries, the turn table DJ, and that stupid line of dialogue "I feel lucky because I'm a punk!," I can focus on the making this film about my mother more fluid.

I had reservations about showing it because I wasn't psychologically prepared to release it. In the back of my head, I kept thinking about my mom and how she would react to it. This era was tough for her, and I really didn't wanted to have her relive any of the heart ache of that time. I guess this was lingering in my head the whole time the film played, so I was very relieved that this film was well received. I feel better about showing this film now, but not until I do some tweaking. Once that is done, I will post it online.