The Kendal curse
I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day when my kids woke me up at 8.30am to ask if they were going to school. It was the first day of my tour, and I was due in Kendal that evening, but had a long list of jobs to do before I’d be able to strand up and do my thing. Waking up at 8.30am wasn’t a good start. Getting them dressed, finding there shoes (“where are you bloody shoes!!!”), and sorting out their lunch was achieved in record time, and they made it to school in good order, with other late parents still milling around (it’s always good not to be the only late parent). The next incident was when I got Alastair lee’s house to get some footage from our Winter Patagonia film (as you can see, the talk now a few hours away and I’m still picking up key components of it!). He’s got a couple of funny out takes that didn’t make it into the film (I’ll stick some on here soon), but being huge files we couldn’t fit them on my hard drive. Conscious I still had to sort out my show when I got to Kendal, I just said ‘Oh delete some of those folders, , which he did, which turned out to be a mistake, as one contained my show images…which I only discovered once I was in Kendal. One good thing was I was able to see the rushes of his new film Onsite, which looks like it could well become the definitive UK climbing film to date, with great climbing, great people and some really good footage. Nick Bullock comes across really well, and I;d love to see a feature just on Nick. Anyway if you haven’t seen it, then here’s the Youtube promo.
Arriving in Kendal with 3 hours to go I suddenly realised I’d fucked up, so started furiously reseting my slides in Keynote, only to have the program crash within a hour (I hadn’t saved it), so was back to square one with two hours to go. Luckily I had quite a few film clips, so that took the pressure off a bit, so all I had to do was construct my story around them. Soon it was time to go up to the theatre to set up, and even though I hadn’t actually finished, I knew I had time to finish it off once I was plugged in… ...Unfortunalty the unwritten ‘Last minute’ rule kicked in (the more problems you leaved unresolved until the last minute, the more problems become apparent as that minute draws near). Basically the MacBook wouldn’t talk to the projector. No problem, I exported the show as a powerpoint presentation, and the tech guy ran home for his windows machine. The problem was, when he arrived back panting, we found he didn’t have powerpoint. So hunt the computer began, with us finally finding a PC as people started coming in and sitting down (show still not finished at this point!). We ran upstairs to the projection booth to put the show onto the PC, only to find when we did that none of the film files played (Powerpoint doesn’t play .mov files!!!). A third of my show had gone. People where now sitting down and waiting for the show to start. Luckily I’m an expert at slideshow pressure, and quickly got together the first half, and left the second half to do in the interval, ran down stairs and began. Did it work out? Only the audience could tell you that.
— September 26, 2008 10:02 AM
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