no business like show business

I was once working on a video project for a client to utilize in a trade show. The initial scope of the project was to produce a five minute video of a software product in action. Narration would talk about what was happening on screen. Three months to pull it off, and it sounded pretty easy. Little did I know.

what I didn't know

We encountered a few bumps along the road to video nirvana. Some of the issues included:

"Did we say five minutes? We meant TWENTY-five minutes.

"The product doesn't have a name, yet"

"The product is called 'Intelisys PowerConnect'"

"Wait! the product is called 'Intelisys ConnectTrade'!"

"Stop the presses! The product is called 'Metiom ConnectTrade'!"

"This is version 4.0"

"Wait! This is version 5.0 - that's even better!"

"We've changed all of the look and feel on all the product screens. You've still got two weeks to change everything, so quit crying!"

I was developing the video in After Effects 3.1. The full length of the project became too much for me to produce on my own, so we outsourced part of the production to another company in Salt Lake City. There we were - making crazy client changes all day and rendering all night (this was back in the day using a G3 300). Winding down to show day, we were still getting crazy changes when my Salt Lake compadres revealed a little problem: their source files had been corrupted and about 60% of the footage they we using was from old renders (you AE people know what I'm talking about here). They could not (easily) make changes (which were coming fast and furious) to the parts that were only available as renders and not source. You know what happened next: the client specified about 1.2 million changes to scenes whose source had been lost forever.

The final two weeks involved a massive, round-the-clock effort at a rebuild of the missing source (the files had about a million layers as the client was a big fan of flying text and logos) and near-constant renders and FedEx's of demo tapes.

crunch time

Fast forward to the last two days. Video STILL not approved. Feverish 16-hour edit session to address all remaining concerns. FedEx deposits Salt Lake footage just in time for languid 10-hour render. Dump to tape. Remove tape from machine just in time to give to Account Girl who catches the red-eye to Orlando ($3200 ticket when you buy it same day). She gets off plane in time to catch cab to hotel. She gets in hotel to hand tape to client, who sticks it in the player a full FOUR MINUTES before the scheduled start of the show, with the video kicking things off.

Thank the good Lord the video worked.