Putting the new audio into the video, and yep the audio quality is way divergent (autofill suggestion suggests "way diversityier than" for "way div;" not even a word; way divergent anyway) and super noticeable, and it would take approximately the entirety of the rest of the time I've got just to put the audios into their right places, much less put footage over them, all so that the audio quality bounces around super jankily but at least the script is something with a marginal amount more polish, and I realize-- it's unnecessary, we can use the draft we already have, it's flawed, there are some boneheadedly obvious connections there I don't make, but it's still got so much stuff in it that I'm amazingly proud of.
I might use some of the new audio in the project, but, I'm going to be sticking largely with what I'd already had- after all it's right there in the name and everything: the Doc file I was editing and everything finishing up the script is called the January 2nd draft; most of the audio I've got was recorded from a script called the May 4th Draft. The January 2nd draft was the one that was supposed to be influenced by the notes from the At-A-Glance, and, it is, I did get those notes in there. But, I've got the 5 Year Out mark on January 2nd 2025, on the calendar I created to explain the creation process of the video... maybe I will do that director's cut thing I thought I would do, a year ago.
For now, work on getting the finishing footage over the audio I already have. Which means tracking down a halfway old autosave from before I started restructuring everything... Ah whatever, it's not gonna take that long to put everything back the way I had it.
I talk about Robert Downey Sr's Putney Swope in the video, with the metaphor being about how tackling every angle I can, that's the compromise. It felt a little hypocritical recording new audio for that section after discovering a new connection, when that section's about how it's okay to let some connections go unconnected (Robert Downey Sr.'s POUND, which connects to animals with human faces, and also shares a name with Eliot's friend Ezra.) The connections are there, it's not like they're going anywhere.
I don't begrudge the time "wasted" on recording the new audio; there was some stuff that genuinely did need to get rerecorded, maybe. And I'm learning to be more accepting of things going to waste, because, a couple of reasons, learning to let go of the neoliberal commodification of absolutely everything, but also, seeing things in terms of affordances instead of intentions, what things can be used to do rather than what they were made to do- the author is dead, all we have is the affordances.
I'm okay now with the fact that not all the experts I've contacted for research purposes have gotten back to me, there's always the Jan 2nd Extended Edition. If any newspaper or anything had bothered to interview me about the project I would've told them it's longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but shorter than the Extended Edition- maybe with the Jan 2nd cut I can finally surpass that 12 hour 6 minute mark? Because like, I'm not sure how much longer the project was going to be with the new audios put in, but, I think it would've tipped the 9-hour-30odd-minute video into over the 10 hour mark, and like, apparently there's a hard limit to get out of there by 6:30 pm, when I do still want intermissions...