Down The Drain

I am sitting here holding my head in my hands, I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West: "Oh, I'm melting, melting! Oh, what a world! What a world!"

Everything I have worked on, all the projects I've directed and produced with my friends, they are all gone. I thought I had the finished projects saved on a CD somewhere, I backed up my computer about 2 years ago, but I can't find any of the files.

The Golden Girls Lip Sync Idol video has been pulled down from YouTube for copyright infringement. At the time that we put it up, there was a section under the Fair Use clause of Copyright law that stated a portion of copyrighted work could be used as material for a spoof. Which is what our video was. 

But with the passing of Bea Arthur not too long ago, I guess that brought attention to our video, and the copyright owners put in a claim with YouTube to have the video taken down. I went back to the copyright page, and the bit about spoofs is no longer listed under the Fair Use clause. So I guess the laws must have changed.

My friend who was the singer in that video wants to show it to her friends. I say, "Sure, no problem!" But I cannot find the video on any of my back up CDs.  I finally find the raw footage, but not the song. And if our video is down from YouTube, then the web source where we found the song is gone too. So re-constructing the video is not an option. And YouTube has no function for downloading a video that you uploaded. So that video is gone.

And the other video we have up, Karaoke Idol, I can't even find the raw footage for that one, let alone the finished project, same for Engrish vs Englisch. Although Kim had that one on her computer, so fingers crossed that she still has the final version saved somewhere.

Which brings me to the final blow. While the raw footage for Boundaries is not lost, HUZZAH! But I moved the footage around in my folders before I had finished editing the project into a final version. I moved it from My Videos folder where it was floating around with a bunch of other video clips into a sub-folder I created for it, to help better organize My Video folder. So, when I opened the Windows Movie Maker project file to continue editing today, it couldn't find any of the files. Because I moved them. So I imported the raw footage again from the new folder location, and now I have doubles of all the raw footage clips, but the project editing file is effectively useless, it's still not linking any of the editing work I'd done previously on the project to the new file locations. So after all the hours I'd put into editing the project, and almost reaching the finish line, all that work is useless and gone. I have to start over. 

*face palm*

"I'm melting, melting! What a world, what a world..." It's all gone down the drain...  I wanted to finish both Hit & Run and Boundaries... before I started working on some of these new projects I've got rolling around in my head. If I can't drive and get to any auditions, I'm gonna do my own projects here at home, damn it! I've let too much time slip by...

Post Script -- All is not lost, I did find the incomplete rough edit for Hit & Run. I never wrote about it much here, because it was a short supernatural thriller and I didn't want to spoil it. I am editing it a little bit more, it will still be rough and incomplete even after that, since the raw footage is gone. But I will post what we do have, so that the work my friends did on this, and the time they committed to the project won't be a total waste.