Almost there! (But not quite yet)

Principal shooting on The Pirates! has finished. The cut is (mostly) locked. Many of the sets have been dismantled, shooting crew have left, and we can still get parking spaces if we arrive slightly late. We even have Shaun The Sheep setting up where the Pirates sets used to be.

 

 

 Access: DENIED

We had a spectacular wrap party last weekend at Bristol's Mshed, where everyone dressed up as Pirates, Scientists, and some of the lesser-known (and potentially spoiler-y) characters.

We have 4 more weeks of work before final delivery. That's two before Christmas, and two after - in which all versions are finalised, confirmed with edit (who'll be finishing in London by that point), and delivered. It's getting quite close - after 5 years in the making.

 

However, it's proving quite difficult to get the company to get out of the mindset that now that filming's finished the film is over. Yesterday (Friday) afternoon and this weekend, half the phones aren't working while they "upgrade" the system. We've had whole days of not being able to access the viewing theatre. And we're not a small department - we've easily over 100 people. Plus there are outsourced shots to be approved. And still some final bits of sequence which aren't even locked yet.

So, please - everyone.

It's not over when the fat/ thin lady sings at the Wrap Party.

 

Some of us are still going, and really hoping to not have to work over Christmas - with or without added disruptions! Spare a thought for your post people this Christmas. We're still working really hard to make everyone look good.

A Common Problem

Just about anyone who's used Avid before will know that all support queries and error message searches lead back to the Avid Community forum.

This is sometimes all you need to be able to fix your problem (even if the answer usually involves hours of work attempting to find a single corrupted audio file). More often, however, this occurs:

 

from xkcd

For those of you unfamiliar with xkcd (why? how?!) a great feature is the image alt text, accessible by hovering over the image on their website - or via an app on iOS. And it was the alt text which really made me think of the Avid Community:

 

"All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'"

 

Beautiful advice, and also potentially circumnavigating the existing dilema of whether to dredge up a 3 year old thread, start a new thread even though nobody knew the answer last time, or just try to get on with it yourself since nobody knew last time - and if they did figure it out then they're not the sort of person to update the old thread in which nobody else seems to have had the same problem over the last 3 years.