Where Have I Been?

After a few weeks of frenzied blog action, it's now been over a week since my last post. Why?

Let me tell you why.

If you view my profile above, you'll see that there's a link to "mikeysmovies", which, when you click on it, takes you nowhere.

This isn't just some kind of postmodern statement on the futility of life or anything like that. It was actually intended to be a working site, with movies made by me on it. I've been making movies for just over a year, but haven't found out how to post them on the internet. Also, none of the movies I've made so far have been appropriate for an internet audience. In the main, you see, I've made movies for school. So far, I've created a news programme, a version of American Idol featuring teachers singing badly and, the latest, a documentary about a school trip.

Editing movies is a very meticulous, time-consuming excercise, especially if you're me (extremely anal). I spent about 20 hours last weekend editing my documentary, which left me with six minutes of actual documentary.

I store my footage on a portable hard disk. Late two Sunday evenings ago, I dropped the portable hard disk. The file that had taken me 25 hours to make wouldn't open. It was corrupted, apparently.

I started again, saving work onto another portable hard disk while someone in Paris Hilton (my local electrical shop) fixes my old one. Nothing could go wrong this time. I'd learnt my lesson. I would take extreme care to avoid the circumstances that led to me dropping the hard disk. Everything would be fine.

So, this weekend just gone, I worked on it all day Saturday. Then I think I must have pulled the USB lead out of my computer while it was saving, because, after 8 hours work on Saturday, the file refused to open.

So, all day Sunday and for as much of Monday and Tuesday as possible, I've been editing the film for the third time. Fortunately, it gets quicker every time because I kind of know which bit goes where. This time, too, I decided that it might be an idea to save something which is known as a "backup file", or something. Of course, nothing went wrong. It never does when you save a backup file. I finished a first draft of it today. It's 12 minutes long and will probably be shown once in assembly.

It has taken me about 50 hours.

No one asks me to do these things. I quite like it, actually. Gives me a chance to be a bit creative. I get the impression, though, that most people think that I just record all of the footage in order and edit it as I film. That's rather galling.

Anyway, that's where I've been.