The aftermath

I landed back in Brisbane exhausted after 5 crazy days of TINA and NYWF. It was one of those days where things were bound to go wrong. First, I left behind my Paperchase silver pencil case behind. It's not REAL silver people. It's just stainless steel with a silver coloured coating. However, it comes with memories. That was just the beginning.

At Brisbane airport, the baggage carrousel had a problem and was stuck until the baggage handlers came to fix it, thereby making my editor Rob, and the subject of our possible new documentary, Gia, late to pick up gear from a producer who's nice enough to lend it to us and then onto a shoot. Gia was having a glamour photo shoot done and we were going to film her during that shoot.

One of the employees at the photoshoot place happened to be a tranny on the verge of making physical changes to become a woman. She was already living as a woman in her workplace. She was our lucky break, but with a catch. We had extracted permission from the photoshoot people to film the process, including the makeup artist, but they never agreed to interviews. In the middle of Gia telling a story, the employee piped up her own contribution to Gia's statement, injecting a bit of drama into something that was turning out to be quite drab. The manager of the shop swooped down in damage control mode, and said she had only agreed to us filming the process not interviewing her employees. The worst thing was that this piece of spontaneous interaction was exactly the stuff of documentaries.

In the middle of this little drama, we were on another deadline for the re-submission and re-edit of my new short film Life Doesn't Stop, for the Live and Love HSV awareness campaign. We had received an extension to the general deadline because the organisers liked the film but objected to one of the lines in the film. Unfortunately, that line was central to the storyline. This meant a complete rewrite of the script and re-edit of both images and voice-over.

By the time Gia's photoshoot was over it was 4 pm and the deadline was 5pm QLD time. Due to daylight savings, we had lost one hour of grace as the judges would be convening at 6pm EST in Sydney. Not an easy situation obviously. The organisers were going to present us alongside the shortlist, so our chances would be greatly enhanced if we finished in time for 6 pm.

Sadly, due to having to edit on my laptop, and not on The Edge's lovely MacPros, we finished editing around 6:30 pm Queensland time, by the time we had outputted the file to a format we could upload, it was 7:15. Uploading it was another saga, because I could not get my MacBook Pro to see the Brisbane City Council Library network, which is where we were editing, as it was the closest venue to the photoshoot.

So we were one and a half hours late for the submission. I still do not know how it went. Fingers crossed the judges saw our film. It was a very fitting return from a very busy festival to an extremely busy worklife. It's not about to slack off either...