I'm not impressed

We decided to film everything with my camera, so that everything would be the same quality and more importantly, in the same format, so that everything would be easy to edit. I gave out my email and phone number so that everyone who was filming could make some sort of arrangements to use the camera. Naturally that meant that one of my group members had to go out and use a different camera.

My camera spits out files marked .mov. Her camera makes mpegs. One works in imovie, the other doesn't. It took two hours to explain that to her. She kept insisting that they should both work. The rest of us had to keep insisting that it's a matter of Apple vs. Microsoft, apples and oranges.

Fast forward four hours or so. We're still editing things, and trying to film some sort of commentary to go in between interviews. Do you think we could come to some sort of consensus between us? It's a lot easier said than done. Every sentence of narration in that film represents at least 45 minutes of argument over the exact words to use. One person from our group got into the habit of saying "no, we can't say that," or "I don't like that," and then staring blankly off into space without offering a better idea.

Then, just about the time when you thought that she was just disagreeing with everything for the sake of disagreeing, she would come up with something brilliant. She decided all of a sudden that we would use clips from music videos in our project and proceeded to waste an hour and a half trying to download something onto one of the school computers and eventually came up empty. Not that it mattered much anyways. The music video footage had absolutely nothing to do with our project.

Then her second brilliant idea: a punk soundtrack for the interviews, which at best didn't really help anything and at worst, served to completely distract everyone from what people were saying.

Eventually, several hours of argument later, we were finished. The stats:

12 hours of editing to make
3 minutes of film that will count for not more than
10 % of our final grade

Biggest waste of time ever.