Set Diary: 48 Hour Film Project Turns 10

Friday

3:30:  I've had a good night's sleep, a massage and a hot shower.  Now I'm tingling with anticipation.  Jarrah is camping with the Rupperts so I have a blessed hour of silence to myself before the madness.  I stand buttering some toast when the quiet is shattered by a Harley-Davidson roaring into our driveway.  It's my brother-in-law, Ben, from Australia, whose visit has coincided with the competition.  Since he's a film vet himself from the Melbourne project, we're especially glad he's here now.  And by now, I mean for this weekend.  In the actual now, I need to rest my brain.  I send him to Starbucks.

5:00:  I'm driving Ben and Kate, a 16-year-old vet from last year's 48, to the new kick-off location, by Mission Bay.  I've been grumbling about it--Friday traffic!  Beach crowds!--but it turns out to be quite nice.  We meet up with David, Mark, and Mike C. and check in.  While we wait, David shows off aka "demonstrates" his Phantom helicopter camera rig to everyone there.  He's excited for a whole new world of aerial shots this year.

6:00:  We've been chatting with former Toads Jake and Tim and their respective teams and I've been getting messages from my co-writer, Hilary, who is coming from LA and anticipates a late arrival.  That sucks.  But now it's time to pull our genre!  Squeee!  Kate has to leave but really wants to stay just long enough to reach into the hat--youngest team member at the kick-off traditionally gets to pull.  She makes it just under the wire and we get...THRILLER/SUSPENSE!  The only genre (I mean ONLY) that Hilary and I had agreed to throw back from this year's picks.  It just seemed too hard in under seven minutes.  Now we have a decision.

6:30:  There is some hand-wringing, some phone calls, some soul-searching.  The concern is four-pronged:  Martial Arts, Sports Competition, Operetta and Zombie.  Those would be the four Wild Cards that we would hate to get.  And we could get them.  So we suck it up and keep Thriller/Suspense.  Here we go.  I think the weekend will be a Thriller/Suspense now.

7:00:  The elements are in:  Prop--Garden Hose.  Character--Mac or Margaret McCarthy, Interpreter.  Line of Dialogue:  "You know what I mean?"  And we're off.  Somehow no one is in my car anymore, so I Blu-tooth it with Hilary all the way (and I miss several turns) to Coco's.  I keep repeating to anyone who will listen the five elements of plot I want to follow:  Action, Background, Conflict, Development, and End (comprised of the Three C's:  Crisis, Climax and Consequences.)  Really, I just need to drill it into my own head.  But everyone humors me.

7:30:  At Coco's, where the smiling assemblage comprises the most agreeable Brainstorm Session we've ever had.  Tracy, Andra, Rachel, all three Voltas, David, Ben N, Ben A, Mark and me.  Hilary joins later.  Ultimately, the team will be a tidy 18 members.  But this is the dirty dozen that gets things done tonight. Without our traditional breakout sessions, we still manage to get plot, casting, location and even some tricky conflicts discussed into submission by 10:00.

9:00:  The idea is this:  David and I have just seen "Accomplice," the no-walls theater experience in Little Italy, which was definitely suspenseful.  We build on that idea, but since we have no locations on offer this year, the whole thing will be outside.  We decide to start in Mission Trails, but "start" leads to finish.  And somehow the supernatural intrudes, and now there are ghosts and other unexplained phenomena.  And we've got three college friends on a Groupon.  Initially, we'd dared a women-only cast, but somehow our dear editor, Ben A. sneaks in there.  (He's great, so I'm glad he did!)

10:30:  Hilary and I have broken with tradition by not inviting anyone back to our house for the writing.  She creates a Google Doc, and somehow we are so in synch that we can both compose into it at once from our own laptops with nary a scuffle.  In this fashion, we while away the evening, with the occasional text and Facebook update for our cast and crew.

11:00:  David and Ben N. check in from Wal-Mart.  They have just alarmed some Blue-Shirts by inquiring, "Do you have a large hunting knife?  And a mask?  Or some sort of hood?  How about a long, black cloak?"  They somehow get out of there without anyone calling the police.

Saturday

12:00:  My favorite Facebook plea this year:  "Red bandana or something similar that could be used as a gag.  Light cloths that can get dirty for people who are face down in the dirt.  Bonnets?"  It will probably not surprise you that people had all these things.

2:00:  David has to come in and straighten us out a little.  We keep stumbling over the ending.  That's pretty typical.  This is also the time in the weekend when I start despairing a little bit.  I think it's because I feel lousy with tiredness, but I also realize that, like, NOTHING is yet done.  It starts to seem overwhelming.  But we push on.

4:00:  We have nearly five pages.  I announce that we're going to bed.  Last year we didn't go to sleep until 5:30 and that was just too awful.

4:30:  For once, David is already snoozing like a baby.  And I actually follow suit, maybe because I'm not getting amped up yelling things at him.

7:00:  The alarm goes off, but I am already awake.  I shower and go out to make coffee.  All the lights are on.  When I ask Hilary about this later, she says "You asked if I wanted help with the lights.  So I assumed they must be difficult.  Then I fell asleep."  She takes a few minutes to get up but then somehow we both drift towards script polishing as David runs around us, carrying massive armloads of gear to his car.

8:00:  I update our FB page to please stand by for 30 minutes.  David is grumbling that he needs a PA.  "Why don't you ever ASK for a PA?" I inquire.  More grumbling.  We are getting a little stressed because a Polaroid camera has become a key plot point, and Hilary has one, but no film.  I put out APBs for someone to go get some, but no one bites.  Eventually, we finish up the script and Hilary goes to buy it, and David and I head for Mission Trails.

9:00:  It's already hot.  Grace, bless her heart, has brought coffee, water, danish and fruit for everyone.  How awesome is she?  Julianna and Kate have heeded my calls for "Holly Hobbie-ish" dresses, and miraculously, both have something of this ilk.  Julianna's is particularly impressive, though she warns me that she'll have to be shot from the front as it won't zip.

9:15:  I greet our three new team members this year--Dana, who's on boom mike, and husband and wife duo Mike and Mae Linh, an absolute positive, cheerleading delight from start to finish (I'll include Dana in that set, too!)  They do slate, sound, camera and absolutely anything that comes up--the rare combination of both techie and creative.  They never complain and are always smiling.  How did we get so lucky?

9:30:  I gather my actors and give them a stentorian pep talk about the importance of flexibility, fluidity and other f words.  Because they are awesome, they just nod and look really, really serious, which is what I want them to do.  David asks if we're going to have a read-through.  "Nope," I say, with not a little malicious glee.

10:30:  Trying to follow a location search party that's gone ahead, the group I'm with actually gets lost.  We have to stay in one spot and make calls until we're found.  If that's not verisimilitude, I don't know what is.

10:40:  We are HIKING to our location.  Hiking.  With coolers and bags and loads and loads of stuff.  How did this happen?  I am already sweating.  Our "college friends" (I take to calling them "the weird sisters") catch up to us in the casual hiking duds they'll have to wear all weekend for continuity.  Somehow this means sassy Daisy Dukes, fetching colorful tops and coordinating jewelry.  Yeah, I always look like that when I hike.

11:00:  We're stationed at what we come to call "the hut."  Which I suppose it is, though it has no roof.  I wonder if it used to, but then people did meth in there or had orgies and they decided it's a surveillance problem.  We end up camped here for the next nine hours plus.

12:00:  I'm feeling ahead of the game because the script is done, but the boys quickly eat up the extra time filming about 37 angles of people running.  Which is a segment we eventually cut down to about 15 seconds.  I've begun to notice that no one asks any questions about the importance of a scene at the beginning of the day, but by the end, I'm having to plead for the life of major plot developments that no one feels like shooting anymore.  It's getting hotter and the water is almost gone.  And people have to pee, which is, well, inconvenient.  Not me, though.  When I hike out to the bathroom at the end of the day, I realize I haven't gone since I woke up.  Guess I must have been busy.

1:00:  The issue that comes up early is tone.  Are we going to be funny?   Or scary?  Can we be both?  Joss Whedon tells me we can.  But it's a balancing act.  After all the running, we move into two segments where our weird sisters encounter wacky characters.  Both of them are completely hilarious--a young man in a full tuxedo who steps out of the wilderness into their path (that's our editor, Ben) and a girl perched in the doorway of a straw hut, dispensing wisdom about the spirits (that's Kate, our 16-year-old.)  We do a lot of giggling during these shots, but we are also sweating and there's nowhere to sit.  At one point, something bites my tender cleavage and a massive welt grows there.  I tell ya, we braved the elements this year.

1:30:  I can't stop giggling because Rachel looks so excited when she yells "I saw a goldfish!"  It should be "goldfinch," but she tells me "it came out wrong, and I decided to go with it!"  I almost want to leave it in, even though it makes no sense.  I'm also cracking up about the way Benji says "MURRRRRDERED."  Who knew he was such a ham?  Watching what the actors come up with during filming is one of the unadulterated joys of the weekend.  (And I should mention that one of the comments received during the traditional Go-Pro "Monday after" screening is "Where did you get these actors?" As in, "They rock!")

2:30:  Filming the noose, hanging from a picturesque tree in a grassy knoll.  Unfortunately, it's also above a stagnant creek, which is how we all get pretty bitten up.  There are some furtive murmurings about the vast patches of poison ivy and poison oak we seem to be camped around, too, though amazingly, no one falls into any.  (They do fall, however, into lots of other things.)  The noose scene looks gorgeous, with the light just so, and I'm loving the spookiness of it all.  By now everyone is burned, sweaty, bitten and and dehydrated, so we're grateful when Amazing Grace shows up with what seem to be the best sandwiches ever assembled by a human.  We take a much needed lunch break and reassess.

3:30:  Wanting to film the rest of the scenes with Ben, Julz and Kate, since by now we can see we'll have to come back in the morning, and Ben needs to be editing.  The other two, being teenagers, need to be sleeping.  We get spectacularly drained of our blood when Ben is handcuffed to a tree branch near the aforementioned stagnant creek, though he is certainly a trooper, pinned into a patch of brambles and dangling at a weird angle.  Perhaps the unsettling terror on his face (my favorite of the suspenseful scenes) is not entirely acting.  In any case, it rejuvenates me because it looks so good.

4:30:  Julianna as ghost Elizabeth Larouche comes floating over a ridge, her caramel dress blending in with the path and the light.  Gorgeous.  We have her walk backwards with the idea that playing it forwards later will look like gliding--I forget to ask if that actually happened.  She looks both hilarious and scary with her Goth eyeliner, pearls and catatonic stare, but she's none too pleased about the flies on her eyeballs.  "That's what they do," I tell everyone, "they need access to your mucous membranes."  This starts some vaguely off-color hilarity about mucous membranes, but the arrival of the flies is yet another reminder of our mortality, I mean, our proximity to last light.  We also realize that we've missed our window to hit another location today.  It will just take too long to cart out all the gear without a covered wagon.

5:30:  Once our Larouche ghost has been shot (the slate lists the title as "The Larouche Sisters" all day, and is mostly pronounced "La-ROSH" by the cast, making me crazy) my idea for filming both girls back-to-back, wrists bound in duct tape, is noisily nixed.  "What the hell?  Why would duct tape hold a ghost?"  These are the moments when everyone starts to question stuff, because they're tired and want to wrap as soon as possible.

6:30:  Finally, what we've been calling "the walk and talk," a character-building scene where our three weird sisters bond over their fears.  We're really excited to film this whole sequence in one take, but then it also becomes impossible to edit without cutaways to the aerial helicopter footage.  Lucky we have that.  The shooting is ridiculous:  I'm running backwards in a clump of six tall guys holding cameras, mikes and sound equipment, and eventually I resort to jogging while looking over my shoulder.  Sadly, most of this awesome footage is later cut.

7:00:  Oh dear lord, we are losing the light.  I want to squeeze in at least two more scenes before we are forced to wrap.  Some people have an idea that involves a three-way path and some running, which sounds cool to me so I don't really question how it might fit into the script.  We spend a lot of time arguing about it and it's clear to me that I'm not really forming coherent sentences anymore.  Hell, I'm not forming coherent THOUGHTS anymore.  I wonder if it's because I had two hours of sleep and then spent the entire day in the sun making a movie.

7:30:  We're in the clearing where the last of the sunlight can be found, setting up for what we've been calling "the gun scene."  Mark has brought us a vintage revolver.  Or four.  I've been strenuously insisting that there will be no shooting, stabbing, hanging or actual body count in this film, as we didn't pull Horror, and I think suggestion is scarier.  The model I've been using is the original Dutch The Vanishing, which made me sleep with the light on for a week.  Long ago, in what was actually the wee hours of this same day, Hilary and I found it hilarious that the girls would pretend to be Charlie's Angels when they find the gun, all fun and games.  But the tone is changing.  That said, I announce, "Okay, let's do the Charlie's Angels poses!" and about 10 people (including my husband) start yelling things like "WHAT?" "NO!" "That's been cut!" all at the same time.  And I pretty much go ballistic.  All I remember is yelling a lot.  And then a lot more.  And then some more.  And then throwing my purse.  And David saying quietly, "Don't throw your purse."  My heart is pounding out of my chest.  And this feels very, very bad.

7:45:  So what happens there?  Tiredness, as people speculate.  A life-long trigger to people ganging up on me, or even the perception of same.  A hard-to-shake load of insecurity that people are not really respecting the girl director.  And a healthy dose of childish tantrum.  Mix those up, throw in some spice, and you have the goulash of my "cow," as I name it.  I'm not proud of it.  And I'm sorry.  If you were there and you're reading this, I'M SORRY.

8:00:  People maturely go out of their way to calm me down, and we shoot the scene, and the scene is good.  It's one of my favorites.  Lots of tension, and humor, too.  But no Charlie's Angels.

8:30:  And it's undeniably dark.  We've been hearing frogs for a few hours but now they are deafening, as if they're closing in on us.  We can barely see each other.  And what do we do?  Squeeze into a tiny opening in the trees and film people backing into each other and screaming.  Branches reach out for my arms, spider webs brush my hair.  The shoot is starting to seem like the movie.

8:40:  The hard truth:  we've got shooting to do on Sunday (a first) not re-shoots.  We still have no ending.  I suggest someone find out what time dawn is.  No one sighs or complains.  The Cane Toads are freakin' amazing.  We will meet back at 5:30.

8:45:  On the way to the car, Mark tells us about seeing a mountain lion in these parts.  Awesome.  I'm glad we're all walking in a bundle.

9:00:  It's an absurd time to be off the clock during a 48 weekend.  In fact, I'm fairly certain it's NEVER happened.  But we can't fight Mother Nature.  Actors and writers get a break.  David, both Bens, Mike, Mark and some others, however, simply switch to their editing hats.  After some shuffling of gear, they all head up to Go-Pro for the night.

9:30:  I shower off my dirt socks (which takes HALF a bar of soap) and Hilary and I go for Chinese in an eerily silent and frostily cool restaurant near our house.  I expect that the shower and the warm food is going to plunge me into a coma, but not me--Hilary, however, is nearly speechless by the time we get home.  I think she's asleep before I even turn out the lights.

11:00:  And because it's not our usual pattern, I don't sleep well.  Sure, sure, for two hours I'm as-if-drugged, but then I bolt awake with a pounding heart, buzzing brain and shaking limbs.  I wake again later drenched in sweat.  I can't be sure, but I think maybe I am having cold-turkey withdrawal from adrenalin, which normally doesn't happen until after the weekend.  My body gets confused.

Sunday

4:30:  The alarm goes off.  And amazingly, I'm excited to be up and back to work.  I dress and make coffee, letting Hilary know we'll leave in 15.  She stares at me like she's not sure who I am or why she's in my house.

4:45:  Checking in with headquarters.  David has texted at 1:30, reporting that the rough cut is currently 10 minutes.  Urgh.  That's not good, since we haven't even shot the ending.  He has sent a link but I don't have time to watch.  And, if I'm honest, it depresses me.

5:30:  A beautiful, dusky dawn at Mission Trails, where the rest of the team waits in varying states of perkiness.  Mark, tireless champ that he is, has already been there a while, scouting locations.  We are headed for the Grinding Rocks.  What's that you say?  More hiking?  Oh, bien sur.  Can't wait, old chap.

6:00:  Setting up camp.  The sometime-glimmering-and-babbling brook is a fetid, green pool.  Guess the cast will not be dipping their toes.  Need to film some "lost in the woods" footage that I think is later cut.  Also need to shoot Polaroids of our actresses as corpses.  Hilary says she's "recently taken a class on 'Representations of the Dead.'"  Um, what?

6:30:  When it's time to shoot, our entire crew comes together and Hilary and I admit we have a bunch of ideas about the ending.  So we decide to storyboard the necessary shots as a group.  This is amazingly helpful, and ultimately--under the incisive and flexible direction of Mike and Mae Linh--is achieved in a very short time.  A shout-out, too, to Tracy, Andra and Rachel, who totally bring it every time I call "Action!" even though it's their second day of shooting in 48 hours.  Total stars!

7:30:  Some hilarity ensues over a day-old Polaroid of...grass.  It's artfully shot, a blazing green tuft in a dark background.  But I'm not having it.  "What the hell is that?" I yell.  "It looks like a sonogram!"  This leads to an imagined scenario in which an anonymous audience member calls out "George!  I've solved the mystery!  She's PREGNANT!"  Only in a New York accent.  Yeah, we take another one.  This one is decidedly not artful.   Beige.  Grey.  Leaves.  Done.  We need to hurry up.  Families, babies, dogs and bikes have started to stream through our camp.  Who knew there were so many crazy people who hike on Sundays at dawn?

8:30:  We are trying to achieve something that Mike F. tells me is called a "whip pan."  Whatever it is, I kind of want to douse it in raspberry coulis and then lick the plate.  Instead, we have to get a 6-inch hunting knife to look like it's been thrown, accurately, into a tree.  We are not going to do that.  We are not trained circus performers.  So, instead, a series of shots.  And the very last one...

9:00:  ...is the knife already in the tree, and someone needs to "thwang" it and then dive out of the shot.  It's getting hotter and the sun is rising over the mountain, flooding the scene with inappropriate (for the timeline) light.  We need more thwang!  Mark gives it a go.  Then Hilary steps in.  We do it a couple times, and the last one is the keeper, but oops!  The knife dislodges from the tree and falls to the leaves below.  Only...Hilary is down there.  "Hilary, are you okay?" Tracy calls, as Hilary rises from her recumbent pose, palm gently cupping her neck.  I turn around to see red liquid oozing between her fingers.  And then I scream.  I scream and scream and scream.  Others join me.  This is not good.  I mean, it would be a good movie.  But it's not a good...REAL.

9:01:  Triage.  People are running for First-Aid, towels, I get a Coke (what to do, what to do!) and make her drink it.  The blood is not spurting.  Thank heaven the blood is not spurting.  She is white as a sheet.  Someone convinces her to sit down.  Tracy jumps into action (she's like a mini blond superhero; I've always said so) saying Hilary needs to get to a hospital.  Tracy and Andra will take her.  Only we've hiked in.  Mark needs to run for a car.

9:30:  The rest of us start packing up with the alacrity of the Jews after the slaying of the first born.  Gear and photos and ripped envelopes get stuffed into any available bag.  I make a mistake.  A big one.  I text David, "Hilary just got stabbed in the neck with the knife.  Going to hospital."  Soon I will find out that I almost gave my husband a heart attack.  "THIS DOES NOT BELONG IN A TEXT."  True dat.

9:31:  Tracy and Andra help Hilary up the rocks to the car.  She is conscious, walking and the bleeding seems to have stopped.  I start to calm down.  I call David and while he is very upset, he can breathe now.

10:00:  Rachel and I get a ride back to our cars, stunned.  We part so she can go shower and I'm a little surprised when she says she'll be at Go-Pro later and will bring snacks.  Most of the actors beg off the Sunday sessions, something about being "tired."  Like, whatever.  I drop off an armload of props (including a bloody hunting knife--eek!) and hit the road for Cardiff.  About half-way there, I glance at my phone and see a text from Hilary: "I'm in the ambulance..." and I almost faint.  I push on, heart-pounding, glad that she's conscious but very worried now.

10:30:  At Go-Pro.  David greets me at the door, cheery.  Mark, Mike, and other Mike should be arriving with the data momentarily.  But my first thought is Hilary.  As I'm bringing David up to speed, I receive more texts from her:  she's headed for a Trauma Center.  They need to run tests.  Then Andra calls.  Tracy, too.  They were in the waiting room when Hilary was put in the ambulance and no one told them.  Now they're speeding across town to bring her her purse.  We need to find her parents.

11:00:  I've been texting with Hilary.  She's required to have a Cat Scan and several other procedures (which will ultimately take five hours) but she feels fine.  I'm beyond relieved, but figure she probably hates us like poison now and will flee back to LA at her earliest opportunity, telling everyone that the Cane Toads make a practice of murdering their writers at the end of shoots.  Which is why it's such a relief and a surprise when she texts later that she wants to come edit.

12:00:  Ben is looking surprisingly fresh, ensconced in Gabriel's office, adding our latest footage.  I take a call from Marie about the music, one of my favorite moments of the weekend because she always gets me, even though I feel impossibly vague.  Currently, we have some breathing and some zing-y sounds that I'm finding too...campy?  Typical?  In any case, the ghostly piano she composes is perfect.  I am eager to dig into our unwieldy edit, especially now that I've learned it's 14 minutes.  ACK!

1:00:  Everyone who joins us on Sunday is incredibly helpful.  Mike C. works on sound, and he and Kate mastermind a kick-ass credits page.  Kate and Mae Linh have the saucy idea to put all the production crew in our own corpse-pose Polaroids, so periodically during the afternoon we are all asked "Are you ready to be dead for me now?"  Mike F. is zooming through whatever rough patches I point out, and David is color-correcting.  Mark is dashing around, interfacing with all the factions.  He also has some really insightful suggestions for what to cut.  So, things get done.

2:00:  Ben and I have a massive task ahead of us--getting the rough cut down to under seven minutes.  That one detail, all other fixes aside, will make the difference between an eligible and a disqualified film.  So we have to put all other concerns aside until that's handled, and it's slow-going.

2:30:  Rachel is here now, and has mercifully brought me a burger and a latte.  I think these two details are why I don't get my traditional Sunday editing migraine.  And then, like a returning war hero, Hilary arrives, sporting a giant bandage on her neck.  What's incredible is her sense of humor:  not only does she wave away the attention and plunge right into fixing our film, she is the first to suggest that her "corpse photo" include a knife.  Wow.

3:00:  Ben is a wizard.  Or, as he puts it, a ninja.  Really, it fits.  For the rest of the day, every time he finesses a perfect, smooth cut in under five seconds, I shake my head and repeat:  "Benji:  You're a ninja.  An unstoppable ninja."  Because of his hyper-speed, we get a lot more done than I imagined we could.  Oh, and the 14 minutes?  Cut down to 11 in the time it takes me to leave the room and find a warm soda.  Because some footage was accidentally "stored" in the edit.  That was a high.

4:00:  I am getting worried about music.  Marie is working masterfully from home to provide us with the perfect sonic interludes.  Problem is, we're not ready to deal with music, as there are too many other fires to put out.

5:00:  There's something incredibly freeing about cutting your own dialogue.  I mean, it must be sort of hard for the actors, to see their precious lines lost.  And it takes me a really long time to let go and let it happen.  But once I've decided to kill my babies, I squash them underfoot with abandon.  Second by second, we are inching towards the required length.

6:00:  Now we're ready for music.  But I'm hunched over Benji's shoulder, shouting stuff like "Remove her butt!  We don't need that there!" and "We need one more frame of her face from that side!"  I shout to Mark to have Marie start inserting appropriate music in the current cut, but there is some break in the chain and she doesn't get his message until. it's. too. late for me to deal with it.  Sigh.

6:30:  Luckily, the music is perfect.  Now, there are about eight of us in Ben's office, shouting "Drop Jazzy Ghost behind Elizabeth's scene!  Right...there!  Good!  Now move Ghost Song to Margaret's scene.  No, no, no, not Scary Ghost.  Ghost Song.  Scary Ghost needs to be in the gun scene.  Is there anything over the walk-and-talk?  Not that.  Not that!  GOOD GOD, NOT THAT!  AHHHHH!  Ooooh, THAT.  Perfect!  Oh, I can't stand it--it's too good!!!"  How Ben does all this in about 18 minutes without imploding from the symphony of shouting behind him, I have no idea, but I want to hug him for it.

6:40:  I'm almost crying.  Hell, I am crying.  Mark is leaving with our first edit, aka "the crappy one" that has no music.  While this is actually the first movie we've done that I think is still decent without music, I want my music!  It must happen.  Ben is getting it done as fast as he can.

6:45:  There is a scuffle because David and Mike C. want to review the sound, and I don't understand why they have to do it while we're doing the music.  Someone explains that everything must be done in one place as of now.  It's making me so mad I can feel my fingers and toes buzzing.  It's not rational.  It's just that I.  NEED.  EVERY.  PRECIOUS.  MINUTE.   For me.  MINE. 

6:50:  There's a skirmish because the title card and Cane Toad logo have never made it onto the edit and now we can't find them.  People are literally running around, searching computer desktops for these missing elements.  It is also revealed that some of the Polaroid corpses never made it into the credits before they were uploaded.  I am wringing my hands, moaning and running back and forth, back and forth, outside the editing room.  I can't stand the pressure anymore.  Ben and Mike F. and Mae Linh are looking at me sympathetically.  Rachel is rubbing my back and reminding me to breathe.  Ben A., bless his heart, is still valiantly searching for our title card.

6:55:  Rendering.  Title card, logo, credits and the rest of the music transitions be damned.  David wants to check things, but we checked things the two years we were late, too.  I will NOT be late.  I will have an imperfect edit but I WILL NOT BE LATE.  I'm shouting and jumping around and people are starting to look at me like I should not be driving.  But although I can't articulate it at the time, I know that driving is the only thing that will calm me down.

7:00:  "I'm coming with you!" Hilary shouts, and I try to dissuade her--how will she get back to North County?  Like Victor Velasco, she says she'll meet that problem in New Jersey.  Or something like that.  Kate says she's coming, too.  Her dad shoots me an alarmed stare that seems to say, "Are you fit to drive or do you plan on killing my daughter?"  Secretly, I'm feeling relieved and happy that I'll have my girlies with me in the car.  Because last year I was so tired and scared that I missed several exits.  

7:02:  "IS IT RENDERRRREDDDD?  Because we are going to be late.  We are GOING TO BE LATE!"  Tim runs by and says "You can go with me if you go right now!"  David laughs because Tim is a race car driver.  But I can't go because the damn thing is still rendering.

7:05:  "I'll be in the car!"  I run to the car, talking to myself.  "Do NOT hit other cars pulling out.  Do not hit anything!"  We are already late, already late, already late...I back up to the door and keep the car running.  Then I see Hilary sprinting toward me with the thumb drive.  Kate follows seconds later.  They leap in.  "Drive.  DRIVE!" Hilary yells.  "Just do it...NOW!"  And I drive.

7:06:  And I make a wrong turn.  "I'm going to have to turn around!"  Someone gently suggests I can just meet up with the other road.  I do.  And now I'm on the freeway.  And there's no traffic.

7:15:  Driving.  I veer onto the Local Bypass and Hilary freaks out, but I know what I'm doing.  I feel strangely calm now because they are in the car.  And I know they will run like the wind.

7:26:  Pulling into the Hazard Center driveway.  When was that Mexican restaurant razed to the ground? Can't think about that now.  I bounce over a bunch of speed bumps.  "I'm going to run with you.  I'll park and we'll all run!"

7:28:  We're sprinting like mad to the door.  And we're in line!  Before the countdown!  Duane ushers us to the check-in desk.  We've done it!  WAAAAH!

7:31:  I'm not even tired.  Normally, the adrenaline oozes out of me and I get all noodly, but I feel fine, if very thirsty.  Mark heads to the bar to get me a Cosmo.  Ahhh.  We get a big table and soon we have me, Hilary, Kate, Mike C, Mike F, David, Ben and Mark gathered around, drinking and ordering dinner.  Other teams stop by to chat and offer their congratulations.  And I accept them greedily.  We made it!  Now to wait for the premiere!