No Sleep 'til Sacramento, Ugly Cut

Alright, it's been a long night, and many many uploads and downloads later, it's finally here.

Here's the back story-

Years ago in college I took a documentary class as part of my production degree and it happened to be around the same time as a gaming convention. I used to go to these when I was much younger but hadn't been in close to ten years, so I wondered what they were like now, etc. Turns out some friends of friends were going and had agreed to be part of my little quasi-verte documentation of a role playing convention.

This was a one man show-I showed up in San Ramon on public transportation with a Canon GL-1 and a shotgun mic on a pistol grip. I didn't even have a room. My main subject didn't sleep for 50+ hours, so I kept the camera on him the entire time in case he broke, he didn't. I slept for 4-5 hours under a table curled up around my camera against a wall.

Then came the editing. I was never happy with the cut of this film because people who didn't know what role-playing was didn't come out of it any closer and I never really formed an arc with anyone. So I sat on it promising the people in it that I was going to re-cut it and they'd see it then. Well, I never re-cut it. It sat on my hard drive, some key parts ended up erased, paths lost. My drive was corrupted so I had to reset it. I moved what I thought was all of it to another drive and updated my OS, accidentally losing my editing programs.

I assumed at this point it was hopeless.

Then I was helping someone edit some footage and we had to use my hard drive as a scratch drive, and lo and behold, there it was in it's spotty glory. I talked my friend into letting me export it and saved it to my drive. But, in uncompressed form it's over 2gigs and I don't have the programs to compress it with. After a ton of hit and miss I downloaded HyperEngine AV and managed to create a much smaller version of it, which hopefully you see here. Once I can look at all of this again I'll make a better version of the transfer, but I thought all things considered I needed to get some version out there when I could.

If you're a subject in this documentary and are here to finally see this, I'm sorry it took so many years. I hope you enjoy what there is of it and thank you for letting me film you. If you're anyone else, look at it as an artifact of my early filmmaking and I hope you find something to enjoy.

So here, finally, after many years delay, is No Sleep 'til Sacramento-