...and when the universe is overrun with space elk, who's going to hunt them if not Ted Nugent?

Just some food for thought.

For those of you clinging to your seat wondering about the outcome to the editing software sweepstakes, we have a winner. Through process of elimination, Adobe Premiere seems to have come out on top. The clincher came when it loaded MXF files with no problem and played them back with no performance issues. If the internet (Thanks Creative Cow. Check out creativecow.com if you're interested in the technical side of movie production. It's a great resource and so far more helpful than Adobe's documentation) hadn't informed me that it can edit at audio sample levels it probably still would have lost to Sony Vegas. It almost did anyway. Premiere's attempts to go 'pro' by mimicking Avid have led to regressions in usability rather than progress. I'll try and save that rant for a separate discussion on the People Who Care blog.

I will say that I was unable to update the program. After reading the official technical advice which informed users they should install and reinstall the program and along the way completely reformat their entire system, I finally found a half-understood nugget of info in a forum which indicated the fix to the problem was an incorrect version number in the update xml. Talk about criminally ridiculous. Once I got past though and it's not easy to get past something like that, things were a little better.

The subtext here is that I've begun officially editing the movie.

The Return

After a fairly long hiatus for various reasons, we have been shooting the last couple of weekends. We're very close to completing production. Yesterday morning we were able to grab some scenes that have haunted us throughout the shooting. It was our earliest day yet to avoid the din of downtown Seattle. Many thanks to the brave volunteers who showed up at that horrible hour to lend disenchaned veracity to the movie.

The week prior we shot a couple of the space sequences. It's true it's totally ridiculous and miserable to shoot special effects/space shots in a low budget film but whatever. No sense making something boring.

Mad props to the crazy Haitian chick that Mike met on the bus. She did a sweet job reanimating Kenneth Lay so that he could at least make a cameo.