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A contest isn't much of a contest if there's nothing being contested, now is it?

A fine sentiment in the eleventh hour of a competition that is already in the 93rd hour, but one that will bear some context.

Because here is the deadline, folks, and there's no competition for mister Yoda there, with his three fine videos (okay, at least two are fine, I haven't had time to watch the third). There are perfectly reasonable explanations for this, albeit not entirely plausible-sounding at first blush, but bear with me for a few paragraphs...

Week one of the contest comes around, and I'm feeling good about my plans for video domination. I know I don't have time to work on the videos during the week, so the weekends are key. I'm geared up to get filming, and then my sister decides that her on-again-off-again wedding is back on, for that weekend. All of a sudden, I'm out of town for the weekend, and wondering how I'm going to get it done. I manage to put a script together during the week, and have a friend come over on Friday after work, to help out. Only problem is, my camera's video looks like total crap, after filming a little. It's pretty late, and the stores are closing, and the deadline is at 8am my time(GMT), so we're running out of options. We try shooting some basic stuff on our mobile phones, and it looks even worse. Then, there's the issue of sound, which is terrible, and we realize we'll have to be recording all night long, with no time to edit -- a lost deadline already...

Week two starts with me behind a video. Yoda is amenable to the idea of me coming in late -- he's a real sport. It's Saturday, and I polish up the script for video 1, start working on video 2's script, and decide to buy a new handycam. Sunday I get back to filming. I shoot the material for video 1, and figure I'll do next week's on Friday night (again). As the week rolls by, I discover that my new camera didn't come with a cable (are you kidding me??). I get a DV-Firewire cable, and Friday rolls around, time to finish the first one, at least... but my firewire port doesn't work. I look all over for a DV-USB cable with no luck. With time running out, I end up re-installing my old sound card, which as an active Firewire port in it. It's midnight on Friday. I start trying to get the video onto my hard drive with no luck... turns out, my camera isn't compatible with my Sony editing software. At 4am, I give up. Another lost deadline...

Week three starts with some fun news, that I will probably have a work crunch eating up the final weekend. Better move fast! I get Adobe Premiere CS3, and try and get the camera to work with it. I'm really regretting not researching more, this camera-software compatibility thing. It really doesn't want to work. I finally get it working by sheer luck -- Premiere needs to have its camera settings tweaked, then the app restarted each time. After many tries, it starts working! But now, I realize that the lighting was changing in the shots, because it was taking too long, and I'll need to reshoot a lot of it. I give up on that for awhile, and put the script together for video 3. At least I've got those... and now, at least I have the tools together. I get ready to reshoot, and the power plug on the camera gives out. It's Sunday, and stores are closed for the night. Only one more weekend to go...

Now here we are in the final weekend. I've seen Yoda's vids, and I think they're pretty good, pretty solid. Not funny, not as entertaining as I'd like, but for a hardware vid, I think he's done about as good a job as you can do... I don't really see a point in doing one of the same type, so it's important to me to do something different. I start shooting all three vids at once, I get my girlfriend and a co-worker to help out... and this time, it's my PC -- my old/work PC, not the new gaming rig. This time, my PC starts restarting while I'm importing video into it. No apparent reason, it just doesn't like some kind of power flux, or gets overworked, somehow. Let's just say it's finding new ways of making me hate Windows.

And finally here I am, three hours to go, and about 12 hours of video work left (and work work in four hours) on the first one, about the same on the others as well. It's a shame, I've put in so much effort, but have squat to show for it as the final bell tolls. I've decided that I'm at least going to finish two vids, even if they aren't going to count in the end. I think it's only fair that Yoda win this thing, he's been on time all the way, and even if I think my vids would have been better, mine didn't show up to the dance! I'm thinking of alternative plans, but mostly I'm really bummed out about not having contributed anything (yet) to the contest, what a loser! I promise I'll show up with a vid very soon, so we'll see what happens...