It’s been awhile. I mean, months and months of silence from our end. It’s not that we have forgotten this space and the folks involved, but we have our reasons. You see, things sometimes happen beyond our control, or they happen just when you’re about to prevent them from happening. In our case, they happened while we were preventing them from happening.

Let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from the end of production in September. Things were beautiful then, a gorgeous fall filled with networking and parading about our baby like it was the prettiest thing to ever come out of Boston. We cut a trailer, a rough cut, in time for the Austin Film Festival and handed it out down there. People dug it a lot and we received a lot of feedback on the trailer, the stills, the production overall. There’s a lot things, looking back upon that whole period, that we could have done a lot better, organizational wise, or creatively, etc. I mean, there always is, but you usually never get the chance to do it again.

Well we backed up our trailer and all its raw footage and we started towards organizing and planning for the main edit. We had everything labeled, we had begun syncing, we had a sound editor and potential scorers lined up to go.

And then it happened.

That stupid hard drive. Yes, one. because we were broke during production and could only afford one at the time. It was a raid-0 striped 1.5 tb drive. Of course, we didn’t think about the drive and its configuration. it was big! and fast! and held our 900 gigs of DVCPROHD footage. And we had begun to back up the drive...

My roommate/cinematrographer heard the clicking coming from the editing suite. Yes, THAT clicking. the kind that makes a filmmaker fetal for days. Less than 6 months after purchase, the drive died. Just stopped working. Ironically while during data backup.

Of course.

We sent it out to Drivesavers. They could do nothing with it. One 750 drive in the enclosure worked. The other one? No spinning. Nothing. Because of the configuration, the data was scattered all over the two drives and not copied.

The footage is gone. We have a trailer and nothing else, outside of hundreds of film stills and production stills. We spent 2 months accepting this fact and figuring out what to do next. I’m not going into the emotional upheaval this causes, I’m just now getting through it.

We have decided to do a reshoot in Spring 2009. A lot of folks will be coming back to do it, the main actor included, but some have moved on to other projects. We’ve also begun thinking about data storage you know, a YEAR ahead instead. There’s a mass amount of support for the reshoot and we’re spending the next year in fundraising and preproduction. I have begin reworking the script and I already feel a million times better about it.

So why am I talking about this so candidly? Because we’re not the first production this has happened to and we’re certainly not going to be the last. Because there’s still a lot of people out there who, for whatever reason, are not in the habit of continuous backup. Because many of us lack redundancy for our projects. Look at the projects in your drive. Does another copy exist somewhere? I know at least a handful of you are going to backup everything right now after reading this.

Yes, we should have known the difference. We should have thought of these things ahead of time. For many of us, this was our first feature, and with that comes many lessons.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: back up your shit. now. and everyday. and never use RAID-0 as your primary drive. BACK IT UP.

The trailer is now posted on the page. It is a ROUGH CUT. The sound is not mixed or cleaned in anyway and the song will not be the final one used. The other piece of video posted is our cinematographer’s (Harry Pray’s) reel from Douglas.. There is no sound on it. It is simply some of his favorite shots from our movie. These two clips are all we have left of the 900gigs of footage we shot. They’re also up on vimeo.com.

Anyway, thank you for your support over the past year and a half. We will continue to post updates as they come, events, etc. And look for more blogs as we get back into that oh-so-familiar preproduction territory. This experience has sucked, but as the old adage goes...

that that does not kill us...

-Michelle Millette-
Director/Writer - Douglas.