A brief summary of the Scramble, since I just got cable connection back and I have way too much to do today:

It’s over.

Okay, a little more, then. Shooting went amazingly well; we finished by 5 PM Saturday, which was exactly my goal. Then on to editing: 1 hour of dump time into Vegas (capturing straight outta the camera at 24p, which rocks, by the way), rough edit assembled by midnight. Took a brief break to talk documentary to the guys from APT who tailed us this weekend (doc to air in November, so I hear), and Chance and James Brown joined me somewhere around 10 PM.

Eric dropped by at some point — my memory is blurred — to drop off the music: two great little tag pieces (a la Laurence Juber/Leo Kottke) and an long instrumental inspired by Ozzy’s “Goodbye to Romance”. THe original idea was to have him record an acoustic version of the song in the style of John Mayer, but we scrapped that over unclear rights issues and rules (I do have the recording though, and it’s painfully brilliant — his vocal parody of Mayer’s style is dead on hilarious).

We tweaked the story progression idea — some of the shots involving Michael and Kevin were too perfect to use audio-only, as originally planned, so the edit (and concept) had to be rethought; thank god for Chance and his outside pair of eyes. James came up with the idea of titling the damn thing in Swedish, and so by about 2 AM, we had a really nice almost final version of “Tv� R�rmont�r och Fyra Het Hyndan.”

James left around this point, being the smart one who understands the value of sleep. Chance and I are not so smart, and so continued to tweak the edit and add sound effects until about 5 AM, when Chance took the emergency runner copy with him to render and catch a few hours of power nap.

Me? Yeah, sleep is for the weak. I stayed up obsessively tweaking and retweaking the audio, finishing with that around noon or so. Took a brief break to chat for an hour with Christina, who had just woken up, and then back to work — designing a full DVD package (I should so get brownie points for that) and fixing a credits typo that I had made the night before.

Turned in the film at exactly five PM. I was the fourth one there — apparently, there were three groups waiting for Catherine when she arrived.

Oh, and somewhere in there, a hurricane roared into town and killed us all, according to the weather people. Me, I just lost cable and had the power blink a few times.

Chicken Little James Spann….