Movie Madness

So apparently, it's a school tradition for each department to come up with a skit of sorts for the opening assembly we have on the first Friday of the year. I personally think it's a recipe for insanity. Because our department is small, and I'm the only one with a prep hour, I volunteered to make a short little video clip for our department.

Lessons learned from my experience last week:

#1 Never volunteer to make the short little video clip.

#2 Don't assume the brand spanking new camcorder you borrowed from the school has an interface for a fire-wire, even though an ounce of logic would dictate that any camcorder would have that.

#3 Read the compatibility information VERY carefully before purchasing and throwing away the packaging for mini DVD+RW discs that should have been mini DVD-RW discs.

#4 The nice people in charge of the video production class are very helpful and sympathetic. They also have nifty equipment to transfer the data from the afore-mentioned camcorder (even though it shouldn't have to require nifty equipment to transfer the data). It took us about an hour to figure out, but hey--I was contemplating just dumping the whole project by that point.

#5 It doesn't hurt to mention your nephew's name when making friends with the people mentioned in #4. They sang Sid's praises to the rafters. Mrs. Atkinson says hello, Sid.

#6 Remember that short little skit? It takes approximately 2 hours to edit the video footage into the 2.38 minutes of finished video. That's without adding music. Which I didn't do. I was too stressed out (and out of time) by that point.

#7 After all of that, don't be surprised if the English department pulls off a mini-Broadway musical on film that puts everything else to shame.