I should be in pictures.

I want to make movies. Or rather I AM making movies. But here's the thing. It's HARD! I knew there was a lot of work involved, but DAAAAAMN. Now I know it's easy to grab a camera, and a bunch of friends and even come up with a script, and just shoot the thing. And to some degree that works. But my goal (and the goals of the friends of mine involved in this venture) is to create a real film, that not only looks as good as we can make it (with a working budget of spare change), but be watchable. Needless to say, we did research, a lot of research. In fact, a few of us have been reading books, and listening to lecutres, and talking to people for years now. So we felt it was about time we got off our asses and just startedt o do what we wanted.
We took the books, and guides, we had and trusted, used them to come up with a basic plan of attack. First we get an idea, write a first version script, come up with a cast and crew, and start planning. How are we going to do this? where are we going to do this? How are we going to get away with doing things without getting arrested or sued? How are we going to make Eric remember his lines? How are we going to make Jeff keep his pants on?
Little by little we solved (so we thought/think) our problems. We get locations, we find crew, we get costumes made, we reherse, we build camera and sound rigs, we run tests and things are looking good.
So we set a date, we go out, and start to film, and it is fun. By the end of the day, we have run around, caried heavy equipment up and down big hills. Worked for a goof 5 hours, and shot a good 15 minites of footage of which we think we will use 2 minutes. All in all we are feeling good. We feel damn good. let's do this again tomorow, and every chance we get. I'll get new shoes because my feet are sore, and some of those gell things that are all squishy.
And then, the big fish of reality slaps us in the face. We forgot a few things in our haste. We didn't account for lighting... i mean we shot outside, at noon! So what I mean to say is we forgot to control the light, and shadow. So half of our picture is washed out, half is black. We didn't practice with our camera rigs enough, so some of the footage didn't work out right. And we had some costume issues...All problems that are fairly easy to solve. What is killing me, is that we overlooked these basic things.
Instead of feeling like we just took a dozen giant steps back, we all feel like we took one step to the left. We now realize what we missed. We can see how far we've come, and what we can do. and we know how to make this work. Change the formula, shake, serve over ice.
I'm feeling good, making movies is hard work.