B:
This episode took a long time to produce, mainly in the editing. Post-production stretched over most of March and all of April and May.
I'm not sure how many hours I spent editing the show, but I suspect it was about forty, which is average for an episode of ROX. However, I wasn't able to sit down and work on it for more than a few hours at a time. Instead of five sessions of eight hours each, it was more like twenty sessions of two hours each. Thus the process spread out over weeks and months.
This was a difficult episode to edit for a number of reasons. There were hours and hours of raw footage which had to be reduced to just 28 minutes. But more than that, I was frequently overwhelmed with a sense of frustration. I didn't have all the footage that I wanted for this show, and I wasn't happy with the technical quality of what I did have.
But I'm not sure what the main source of my frustration really was. Sometimes I felt that the concept was weak. Other times I felt it was the execution. And quite frequently, I got tired of listening to myself blather about such trivial bullshit while there was a war going on.
Somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 Iraqi civilians died while I edited this show. Their deaths were paid for with my tax dollars. That fact tended to make this show seem pretty frivolous.
But for whatever reason, editing this show was a big pain in the ass!
As for the final product: Am I happy with it? Was it worth the grief? I don't know. I just got done with it yesterday. Perhaps I'm being overly critical because I haven't achieved the necessary emotional distance... but I'm inclined to think this episode sucks.
Let me know what you think.
