I had just about mastered the final DVD’s for Gone Fishing, in both PAL and NTSC, with both Dolby Digital and DTS sound, with perfect picture (even the NTSC thanks to a great system trascoder called Canopus Procoder 3)…

And then I got the dreaded email. We had missed a person off the credits. And it was one of the actors! How could this possibly happen? Well it does on low budget films. The problem is that it’s no-ones particular job to deal with making a credit list. During the shoot, a credit list is very low on the crisis management list. So this happens.

The good news is that as I am writing this, After Effects is rendering a new end roller which I will drop into the various edits later today, and then I will rebuild the DVD’s and BluRay disks. As for the HDCamSR master, I am doing some clones at the weekend and hope that I can drop them onto those tapes then. It should all be fine.

There is a hidden gem here too. After doing all the DVD’s yesterday, I was struck by an obvious idea which would have meant remaking all the DVD’s anyway. I was wrestling with ‘All that work to remake the DVD’s for this damn idea I should have had weeks ago…’ when I got the email about the missing credit and I am now obliged to rebuild the DVD’s. My good friend Johnny Newman made a film a few years ago which I edited for him, called ‘Foster’. It’s a touching tale about fostering young kids, and it won a few festivals. Last week, Johnny got a call from Walden Media (the guys who made among other things, ‘Bridge to Terabithia’) as they had a DVD of ‘Foster’ and liked it. It occurred to me that if this was gong to happen with ‘Gone Fishing’, I ought to have something on the DVD about Rocketboy. I already have a short promo made up of the concept art, so now I am going to include that as a button on the menu saying something like… The Next Project – ROCKETBOY…

So like everything in life, where you lose, you gain! Sure I have to remake all the DVD masters and stuff, but I also get a better crack at getting the message of Rocketboy out there.

You can view the short Rocketboy promo here…  (it's 5mb H264 encoded MOV, so give it a moment to load).

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com