First deadline

I feel as if I can breath a very short sigh of relief today as I have completed the main bulk of one of my uni projects. I worked on it pretty much all day yesterday, and had to miss a lecture for it. The only break i got was the writing cirlce that I host every Monday evening, but even then I used part of my time there to help me with my work by reading out a script treatment.

I'll just fill you in on a few details of what this particular project is all about. It's called a minor project, so although I'm skipping and jumping about right now, the amount of work involved pales in comparison to the work for our major project and dissertation. For the minor project we have to develop a film idea to the treatment stage and pitch it as though we were pitching it to a Hollywood producer, or production company. Basically who we choose to pitch it to is up to us, we just have to do the research for it.

It's took me ages to get round to doing anything for this project because although the film idea is really good and very marketable, it was a bit of a nightmare to plot. But when deadlines loom you just have to grit your teeth and slog your way through it into the early hours of the morning. For an all nighter I actually got to bed relatively early at around 2:30am, but had set the alarm for half seven so I could continue with the work today.

However, I couldn't get any sleep, and it wasn't because I was worrying about the deadline or failing the project, or even having to stand up and talk for 15 minutes. I'm getting used to public speaking now, I only ever feel nervous just moments before I begin but once I get going I generally keep it together. I couldn't get to sleep because I had been working on the thing so solidly for several hours that my mind was still working on it. It kept writing and planning the thing out. I think altogther I must have got 2 hours sleep because even when I got to sleep I would wake up again up wondering how long it would be before my alarm would go off. My housemate Sophie was pulling an all nighter as well, and she didn't even bother with sleep. I could hear her coming in from the summer house to get cups of tea or coffee.

So when my alarm finally did go off I had been awake for 10 minutes already, but I had slept just long enough to not to want to get up again. In fact I was really scared a few hours before when I was setting the alarm that I would refuse to get up for it until it would be time to go to uni without the work being finished. But I stayed in bed for another hour and got up not long after eight, although that was a pretty painful experience.

The first thing I had to do this morning was test the length of my pitch. The whole thing is meant to be 15 mins long with 2 mins leeway either side. The bulk of the pitch was for telling the story, and the last 5 mins would be for giving budget proposals, and production details, marketability etc. Anyway all I really had this morning was my story and I timed how long it took for me to talk it aloud - it clocked in at 18mins! already over the 15 min timeframe and I wouldn't even be able to say all the other stuff that we're supposed to include. So I spent alot of my time this morning editing the piece down so I could still tell all the good parts of the story without it running over. After much fussing about with it I got it down to around 8 mins, which was a lot better.

I then spent the rest of the day finding things to backup my words when I start talking about things like marketability and it's proposed budget. To be honest I still haven't a clue how much it would cost to produce this film. I just used the budgets of two other films as reference points, trying to point out similarities between how they were filmed to what mine film could be like and had my budget come somewhere in the middle.

So my presentation was scheduled for 12:40 and I literally had everything done and ready by 12, which gave me just enough time to have a shower and copy the powerpoint I made to disc. I then had to rush the twenty minute walk to uni making it through the door just on time and feeling a little out of breath. I psyched myself up ready for the pitch (which as well as being watched by our marking lecturers it is being filmed as well) and put my disc in the pc to start up my powerpoint, but.... It's not working. Powerpoint won't open my powerpoint document. Then it dawned on me that my computer now uses the latest version of powerpoint and I hadn't saved it so that it would be compatible with later formats. My lecturerers spoke of rescheduling and I almost leapt for joy - another day or two longer and I can make my power point slide really snappy, with sound effects and shit like that! But they meant reschedule it for later that day - infact they gave me an hour. An hour to walk my 20 minute walk home make another copy of my powerpoint and make the 20 minute walk back...

For a very brief moment I got an inkling, just a very very, itsy bitsy, teeny tiny, very very, little bit of an inkling of what it must've felt like for one of those prisoners on death row on the day of his execution, having his last meal, speaking with the priest, making his piece with the world, really finally excepting the fact that his time is up and he is going to die today... only to be told in the eleventh hour that today is in fact not the day - perhaps in that moment he is also thinking "maybe they'll give me another month? or a year even?!" - but then he is told that they're rescheduling it for tomorow instead. He has spent the last few hours psyching himself up for the end of his own existence but then they open up to him the possibility that he could live a few hours more.

So the feeling I got in that moment was a severly diminished version of that without the morbid awareness of knowing you're going to die very shortly.

But go home I did, got the work saved in a format that the computer at uni could read, came back and gave my pitch. I think it went okay. For the most part my pacing was pretty good, and I felt i was speaking clearly enough. If anything it will be the content that lets me down but it will be a while before I get my marks anyway. The hardest part about the pitch was trying to read the reaction of my lecturers. It was hard to tell if they were getting it, understanding it or even if they thought it was complete shit or not - it was even worse when one of them would suddenly start writing notes cause your mind starts screaming

"What are they writing?! Something I said just now has made him start writing! He found something wrong, or he didn't like something!".

Having this screaming voice going on in my head as i'm trying to deliver a verbal pitch was really distracting, and I think there was a moment when I did lose my place and I had to pause to remember where I was.

I'm not really expecting first for this one, but I'll keep my fingers crossed for a 2:1