This week has been different from the rhythm of the past couple months of production. I had a lot of problems to solve, and some still to tackle.

The files from the Black Magic are even bigger than I anticipated, so I invested in a 4 terabyte hard drive, which is about as big as I could go without going solid state, and I really needed something portable. If I'm careful with the shooting, it should be more than enough. From the start I formatted it to be read/write on any computer. This is important for me because I have several workspaces throughout the city, including both public and private editing bays. While I edited Real Boy, an Allegory, having the flexibility to edit in lots of places was crucial, so I wanted to maintain that, especially for a project this big. But it didn't work. The drive was read-only and I had already dropped half a terabyte on it. I have a backup through BackBlaze, but by the time they send me a drive I will have gone through another day of shooting. 

Luckily, my studio has a shared drive for just these kinds of issues. (We also use it to archive projects). I started transferring everything yesterday so that I could format my personal drive. I reformatted it to "OSX Journaled." That should have been enough, but for whatever reason, disk utility said that the drive was full, and it wouldn't appear in the Finder window. I "deleted" everything off of it and it now it not only works, it's writeable on the lab computers that I use. I came away learning so much about hard drives that I'm sure will come in handy for my career. It occurred to me during this process that storage has gotten so much more affordable and accessible in the last few years. I can't imagine where video art will be in another decade!

I was presenting my work in progress to my studio mates yesterday; I had to get up and leave right in the middle. It was awful, but I had menstrual cramps so bad that I was lucky to be able to drive home safely. I used to have hesitation about saying that, chalking it up to "medical emergency" and "sudden illness," but I'm not sure why. I'm obviously a woman, and it's obviously my experience. No reason to hide it if it starts to effect things. 

That's also why I'm posting this today; I couldn't yesterday. I hope that by the time this summer rolls around, I will have blog posts ready to roll out on an automatic schedule to prevent these kinds of delays. That said, it's a priority to make my updates about Delta Phi immediate and time-sensitive so that you can get a feel for what it's like to be in the midst of a production like this...and what is a production like this? Something to think about for next week....

Peace,

Ayah, #DeltaPhiFilm