JohnCalvinYoung.com

Sometime last Tuesday or Wednesday night, mired deep in the mid­dle of the edit for A True Patriot, poet­i­cal lines of frus­tra­tion began seep­ing into my mind around my con­cen­tra­tion. I took a few min­utes off to write them down, and it quickly mor­phed into the Filmmakers’ Night Before Deadline. Thankfully not EVERYTHING in the poem hap­pened to me this time, but a good bit of it did…including mul­ti­ple power fail­ures due to a bad AC power adapter dur­ing the edit and …

It’s rather rough, and some of the lines don’t really scan, but this is more-or-less just as I wrote them down. With no fur­ther ado…

Twas the night before dead­line, and all through the house,
Every time­line was rolling, and I burned out my mouse.
The titles were per­fect, ani­mated with care,
But the effects shots were not–in fact far from fair.

I was still up; could not go to bed,
Visions of trans­parency danced in my head.
When I the space­bar to out­put did tap,
My cam­era decided to take a short nap.

Then from my lap­top the hard drive did clat­ter,
After Effects had eaten the RAM and crunched on my plat­ter.
I sprang to my desk and quick as a flash,
Shut down iTunes for the fast final dash.

As soon as free resources had hit a new low,
The cir­cuit over­loaded and my power strip did blow!
Thank God for Autosave; my files were fine;
My nerves were not–I ’bout lost my mind.

My ren­der­ing sure wasn’t mov­ing too quick,
Time, on the other hand, was con­tin­u­ing to tick.
Faster than sound the dead­line approached,
But then I remem­bered how I’d been coached:

“Bake cook­ies!” I shouted up, “Raisin!”
“Chocolate, Oatmeal,” to tempt the mail­man!
Let me print up the cover, clean up that shot,
Finish my ren­der, and you’ll have the lot!…

Hope this helps relieve some stress for a film­maker rapidly approach­ing a deadline!

IHS,

John Calvin Young