Our final project is officially over, and I can’t even express the relief I felt when Heeral, external hard drive in hand, sprinted to Jonathan to turn in our final project at 4:58, when it was due at 5. We worked all day on Thursday, other than a break for the onesies (a talent show), and all day today, but after starting again on our project (we didn’t want to call it starting over because we didn’t have to re-do all of our work, just all of the important bits) last week, we didn’t have much time to edit. We originally thought we’d have two weeks to edit, so we were all very surprised when we were still editing our video today at 4:30.
We decided to split up the work, and at 4:08, Kellen said we should make sure each of our groups was done with our work at 4:30, so we’d have ample time to put them together to make a cohesive video. Jonathan told us about groups who didn’t finish their videos until right before the deadline, and I was so dead set on that not being us, but sometimes things happen outside of your control, and that’s okay too! But it does always seem that everything goes wrong when you don’t have time to fix it. So, there we were racing to locate all of our files when putting our work together, while the time ticked by. We realized that we needed to put a couple of b-roll shots on a flash drive in order to locate them on premiere at about 4:50. It said it would take about five minutes to put them on the flash drive – at that point, I was basically beside myself. We were all bouncing up and down on the couch, nervously waiting for the computer to work some magic. Finally, they loaded onto the flash drive, and we were able to locate the files, but exporting it was going to take 8 minutes! It’s amazing how 5 minutes, 8 minutes, 30 minutes – in the scheme of things, they seem like nothing, but when you’re down to the wire, they seem like everything. They seem like an eternity and not long enough all at once, and thank goodness Heeral was a track star in high school and had his running shoes on.
We embraced each other so wholeheartedly when we got our project turned in and laughed about all of the hurdles and issues we’ve had to deal with on the way. I’m so glad that I got to work with a group of people that dealt with obstacles so well, deciding to make the most out of difficult situations. I feel so lucky to have worked with such an incredible group – from Jaz, who will absolutely be an award-winning director one day, to Kellen, who is wildly intelligent and witty, and Heeral, who never fails to make me laugh and will always look cooler than me when dancing. I wish we’d all gotten to work together as a class, just because I feel like I’ve missed Lucy, Megan, Jasmine, Helen, and Wanjiku so much over the past couple of weeks in which we’ve been locking ourselves into rooms to work on this project, but I’m so happy to know each and every person on this study abroad! Thank you guys for everything.
