The denouement

Well Team it was a real Hollywood ending for the Emerson Late Shift and their production of Tea & Thievery.

While Kristen and Sara worked their hardest to get everything edited and the reshots and rerecords, we knew from early on that we were coming down to the wire. Colette, Linda and I did our best to support and do what we could, but the weight of the world was on their shoulders and they held up like champs.

As late afternoon approached, technical issues continued to plague us and caused us to get closer and closer to the 7:30PM deadline for submission. We tried calling a few lifelines but no one could really help us until we decided to call the 48 hour film project hotline where Ben Guaraldi was on the phone, talking us through some of our issues and trying to debug our problem. He also strongly recommended that we finish working IN THE CAR and get our butts down to Lir in case we had even a slim chance of working through our technical problems in time to submit. At 6:00PM we piled into Colette and my car with Sara and Kristen continuing to work as we drove, and was Jessica packed and ready to be taken to the airport for her 9pm flight. On the way downtown, Kristen realized she hadn't had anything to eat all day! So I knew my first job when we got there was to get some food into her before we lost her :-)

By the time we got to Lir, we were almost over one hurdle and ready to move on to the next. At 7:15 (by our computer's time) we began the final process of burning the file onto the flash drive to be turned in. The progress bar on the program reported that we were looking at 13 minutes and we started emotionally preparing for the inevitable late submission that it looked like we were destine for. That is until Ben announced to all in the room, (including several people in our same position) that there was 20 minutes left! Their "official" time was in fact 5 minutes slower than our time.

I quickly took my place on the submission line while the file finished downloading. Once that progress bar disappeared, Kristen quickly ejected it from the computer and Colette ripped it out of the computer and handed it off to me. Our "official" check in time was 7:27! We made it with 3 minutes to spare!

Needless to say, it was a relief to get it in and on time no less. It was truly an incredible sense of accomplishment and of course relief.

Unfortunately there were some compromises we had to make in order to make the "on time" deadline so Jessica's fabulous music that she worked so hard on all weekend didn't get in, some of the footage that we really wanted in also didn't make it, and a few additional edits that Kristen wanted to make had to be bumped off the priority list. And probably most nerve wracking of all is that we never got to test the media before we handed it in. Once it went into the sealed envelop we were not able to access it. It's in the hands of the film gods now.

The good news is we know the file worked as we have now watched it several times and LOVE IT. However that said, we'd like to see the final product we wanted to create make it to the "youtube" version. So, to that end, Kristen, Sara, and Jessica are going to continue to work on it and since we aren't even allowed to post it on you tube until the end of the week at the earliest, we will post the project that we wanted to do film instead of the one that we wound up with.

Thank you all again for all your efforts over the course of the last 48 hours. And most especially to the extraordinary effort and hours logged from Kristen, Colette, Sara, Jessica and Linda for whom 48 hours was really almost a straight 48 hours  -- combined, this team got as much sleep in the last 48 hours as a single human usually gets in one night. To them, the biggest round of applause and appreciation. And to all of you my thanks!

Hopefully we'll see you at the screening Tuesday night, if not, we hope you will love what we post on You Tube and we'll be looking for your comments when we do!

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