Where the !@#% have I been?

I tell you, the last weeks of a jam packed semester can be grueling. But, now that I’ve had time to recover and reflect, here’s how everything went…

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There were three additional days of shooting on “The Door”, which wrapped filming on March 21st. Postproduction was done over the course of three Saturdays. You may ask why I chose Saturday to work? Easy… because I usually have nothing to do on Saturday. 😛 Editing the film was one of the greatest joys of my life. To finally see something that you labored to shoot come together piece by piece, I know now why I love the postproduction process so much. For the score, I decided against using existing recordings and writing my own score… using a Yamaha YPT-210 keyboard purchased from Best Buy. The actual instrument used was just a warm pad synth, and it just fit the film like a glove. I thought I loved my film without music, but let me tell you, when you add music to picture and watch it unfold for the first time… wow. That’s the best I can describe it. Wow.

The film was shown on April 8th in class. Tom Headley, the associate professor and the head of the broadcasting department had the following to say…

“In almost 40 years, I would put this film in the top 5% of all the films I’ve seen.”

Again… wow. And this coming from the harshest critic of anyone’s work on the whole ETSU campus.

If you would like to view the film, you can via a crappy upload here at Vimeo… I’m going to try to get an HD version up there later this week. I’d appreciate if you guys didn’t spread the film around too much, I might enter it in some competitions later on, mmkay?

Fast forward to April 25th… the Department of Communication awards banquet. Greg and I have been nominated for the Murvin H. Perry Creative Achievement Award for “Clue Me In”. Along the way during the ceremony, I am announced as the winner of the first ever Spirit Award, awarded to someone who always helps others, loves what they do, and exhibits the true spirit of a broadcaster. The perk for this, $100 towards my tuition in the fall. Cha-ching! And the deal was sweetened later when we find out that we won the Creative Achievement award. This award we beat out students not only in broadcasting, but in advertising, PR, speech and journalism for. Wow again. I was fighting back tears when going up to get the award. I never knew I could be so affected by winning awards. If I had to give a speech, I might have been the proverbial Halle Berry at the Oscars. Imagine that…

I passed all my classes, I’m glad I never have to speak a word of French again in a classroom setting… now we can look forward to a summer filled with trying to get past the last two nemeses of my college career, Prob. and Stats (which I failed last summer) and History 2010 (everything through 1877.)

Also, after we got back from vacation, Greg and I discovered that we were in a bit of a fiscal crisis, so to speak. But, we’ve plugged along and I think we’ll be OK until June 2nd, when I get a balance of aid check back.

Well, that’s about all for now, I’ll go dust the cobwebs off of this blog… I’ll have some stuff to pass along later…