The Poster Child for Murphy's Law

Murphy’s Law states that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Always keep this in mind and do your best to prepare for it, which is of course much easier said than done.

The topic at hand was to create two videos both based on the same intentionally ambiguous topic. The first one touched on your personality and the second a collective effort of the group where your individual ideas were collected and displayed together under the same ambiguous umbrella. Murphy however paid the class a personal visit for this project at the expense of the students.

Initially the idea proposed and worked on for the first half of production of the video proved to be unsuitable given the resources we had. Instead of focusing on the idea given the group essentially wrote the pilot script for a television drama. While everyone in the group was vocally supportive of the original pitched pregnancy narrative it was simply out of reach with our limited production capabilities time and length constraints, the inability to speak throughout and a budget of exactly zero dollars and zero cents. While other groups were rounding home plate on their videos ours had to be brought back to the drawing table. This became the first of many interruptions the group faced in creating the final mastercut of the film “Time Flies”.

Ultimately after a weekend of group chatting the decision was made to create a video that was just an ambiguous representation of how something objective and undaunting such as the passage of time is so unique and subjective to every single person. Still the production capturing of these videos was a bit difficult. When filming the personal shot several homemade camera mounts had to be made in order to create the proper angles and steadiness that are needed with a production team of one single person who spent a great deal of that time onscreen. Many scenes had to be reshot over and over and over again as the phone being used to film would continuously fall over, run out of storage space or simply force close out of the camera during the middle of a shot. In every plan that was set up for creating this project found one or more ways to go haywire. After production finished it turned out those problems were only the tip of the iceberg based on the immense amount of technical problems we would then run into.

To identify a possible root of the problem was the fact that Apple’s interface on all their hardware is purposely built to be unique to their competitors like Microsoft. That’s objectively how they create their products their brand and even the way they market themselves. That said if someone has spent their life using Microsoft computers almost exclusively may find an iMac to be slightly difficult to navigate. If you’re Apple illiterate in any way, you will have to get your feet wet...before you really hit the ground running (or swimming).

It became a running theme that when somebody in the group was using iMovie single files or entire finished videos would simply vanish into thin air before transference was even thought of. This tragic phenomenon coupled with the unpredictable nature of the weather in Buffalo put post production way behind schedule. Entire class periods became dedicated to editing, searching and pulling our own hair out. Individual footage would present one minute only one computer and not another and then only the other and then nowhere. Fragmentation became a big problem as well when only bits and pieces of footage would be available for some reason. So the flash drive would be reinserted to get all of the footage put back in and once again only fragments were available.

Moving further into post music became an unseen catastrophe, as mentioned previously there was a set budget of zero dollars and zero cents. This meant that buying bargain bin songs off iTunes was out of the question. Majority of the group after lots of trial and error inexplicitly obtained their music from alternative sources that are still unknown. However almost an entire class period was devoted to first finding a suitable song and then to the obtaining of it.  1/3 of the group decided to skip that whole mess entirely and used songs solely found in the iMovie and GarageBand sound effect library which didn’t have any downloading involved and all the songs were Creative Commons royalty free music. To its credit the free sound effect library was rather extensive as easily held 200+ sounds and short song clips.   

The biggest technical issue faced in putting the groups full length together was that of transference. Getting our physical copies of the individual videos onto one computer to create one official mastercut. It’s still shrouded in mystery whether the issue was simply an iMovie issue or a flash drive issue but there was a communication that was lacking from one computer to the flash-drive to the mastercut computer. Even if the files were all on the master computer they were somehow inaccessible and thusly unusable. Interestingly this was not an issue of amateurization as even when a professional spent the better half of 11:00-12:50 trying to help transfer the files they were still inaccessible. A common occurrence was that the entire group’s iMovie Library and iMovie Theater would be put onto the flash-drive ready to be open in the master computer and the Library and Theater both would be registered as being there in iMovie and therefore accessible from the computer but were for some reason greyed out. The grey font of death rendered the footage unusable until this afternoon when everything went according to plan.

Ultimately video can be much more concise in conveying a message given the fact that it’s the combination of every form of art and expression that preceded it. With that in mind the topic of time was able to be explored much more thoroughly in this medium.