(This is my eighth blog entry for my fall semester J2150 class.)
Friday, yesterday, was a little bit rough for me in general. Maybe a lot rough. I had two exams in the morning, French and Econ, one right after the other, and had very little time throughout the previous week to study besides the day before. Having one exam is stressful, but having two on the same day when you’ve had little time to prepare is doubly as hard. Then, on top of that, I knew that my TV-style video for 2150 was due at 5 pm. I’d gotten the footage Tuesday night, but had hardly had even a spare moment since then to watch it after I’d uploaded it to my computer. I came right home after my second exam at noon and started editing it.
By 3 pm, two hours before the submission deadline, I had completed the script and was watching my video from start to finish and I was very proud of it. Then, when I tried to export the video from iMovie, something happened. A popup came up repeatedly saying that one clip in particular was missing and I could not share or do anything with the video, even save it to iMovie’s library, without reimporting this clip. I tried reimporting the clip at least 10 times and looked up solutions on the internet and emailed my professor back and forth several times but nothing worked. When I deleted the clip and and tried to reimport it, iMovie said it was there, but the clip wouldn’t show up. At this point it was nearing 4:30 pm and I was supposed to be leaving for a meeting that started at 4:45 pm. I was incredibly frustrated, my frustration heightened by the stressful and busy day I was alrady in the midst of and the fact that I had worked for hours on this video and would not be able to submit it in its entirety before the deadline.
In the end, I was late to my meeting and I was forced to submit an incomplete, lopsided version of my finished video at 4:57 pm, with an entire interview missing as well as some additional b-roll inexplicably gone, because I had to submit something. I drove to my meeting and moved on with my evening, thankful at least that this wasn’t supposed to be the final draft of the video. I also reminded myself that in the grand scheme of things this didn’t matter at all, that it was just a video for a class, and that it shouldn’t ruin my evening. I didn’t let it. And as amazing as technology has been in advancing our society, it really, really sucks sometimes. Ugh.
Hannah Black 