Final Progress Report: Turning Texas Green

First, I would like to share final thoughts on the progress on Turning Texas Green even though it has already screened. We had our mix Sunday night for four hours total. It seemed to be going well and I was exicited about wrapping everything up. However, when I plugged my mixed tracks into Final Cut, I noticed the music had been terribly distorted. Thankfully, there was enough time to have a REmix Wednesday morning with an other mixer. He was very helpful in polishing up the sound track, and now I'm glad to have had TWO mixes. And, the animations were really the last thing to do, and I stayed up all night to get them done. So, 18 hours of animating and two mixes later, we're out of post-production! It was certainly a race to the finish.
Now, what did I learn from Advanced Documentary this semester? I learned a lot of things but several things come to mind that I won't forget. One of which is that I will not be choosing another inanimate object as a central character. It takes an incredible amount of strategies to implement personality in something that is seemingly just an object. Also, in terms of character and narrative, I want to cover a story that has an inherent narrative arc, such as an event or process-based documentary. But, the main thing here is I learned that if the character does not have a discernible personality, you have to create one. This is not necessarily a 'bad' thing, it is just something to be well aware of before jumping into a project being a little on the naive side of things.
Another thing I learned is to always keep things moving. Even when disappointments arise in production, it's important to rise above them and figure out a way to make things work. Turning Texas Green did not turn out exactly how I had imagined it. I felt like I wanted to create an abstract documentary about wind turbine in a stylized manner, unconventional of the normal, run of the mill info-doc. The idea was the create a narrative arc out of the life cycle of a turbine. The resources were there: development companies in Austin, construction about to go underway in Corpus Christi, site supervisors in West Texas, and manufacturing plants in Texas like the one in Round Rock. However, what sounded good on paper was a different story when putting the words to action. First off, people generally enjoy helping others even when it comes to obtaining an interview or filming a location. However, there are lot of things in motion when it comes to finally getting it in the can. You've got to get access, and that's sometimes hard to do when you don't already have a foot in the door - something Lacey and I found the hard way. Another thing that just happens, is plans don't always pan out. If you've scheduled to shoot outside one day and the weather turns sour, you're out of luck. This all sounds obvious but it happened to use and created some road blocks for us. Nevertheless, we managed to churn out a documentary I'm glad to say that I'm proud of.
Although the documentary did not pan out as originally planned, I'm happy with the successes we were able to achieve. Who gets everything they want anyways?