Well I had a meeting with the client today to go over our video for the 8th time. Im so flustered by this. Next time Im going to do it a lot differently but we are kind of stuck on this one. So we go to the conference room and it starts off poorly. They complain that the quality of video is not up to standards and then detail of how I have failed and how others have done so much better. They compare me with other projects that had half the budget and were much better in quality. Now I have a pretty good esteem and am objective, so I stood up to the client to defend myself and it got worse. I reasoned that Im proud of this project and it really is quite good. They said they are abandoning the deadline and are going to work on the project til they feel satisfied. What???? More re-edits. I talked to several other people and this sort of tactic is common. So I said lets get started with the video. About two minutes through they had me stopped it and again pointed out how unprofessional it was. At issue was two different types of font used for the Arabic. I couldn’t see it. But it was a valid point and I told them I would fix it. Then as the video started up again, I started praying silently to myself. Please don’t let them change it Lord, please give me grace. Well I didn’t think my prayer would be answered but it was almost immediately. Suddenly the project inexplicably found favor and they stopped complaining. They actually really liked it finally. We only had to make one minor change and one major change in changing the font in Arabic. Because I can’t read Arabic, I did not notice the flaw. Apparently to fix it, the entire thing needs to get transcribed. OK..here’s where the part of God’s grace comes in. We have recently began an association with a professional translator who is quite efficient and affordable. He came in today and stayed until the job was finished. Now, we’ll have something to show the client on Thursday and hopefully they’ll sign off on it finally. We retranscriped and subtitled the entire thing in a half-day. That is remarkable especially when you consider it is a 23 minute show with wall to wall subtitles.
I had to run off to my next meeting to review project #1. The one that we finished last week. So I was there with the PR firm that hired us for this client. This is the client that called us at 4pm needing a re-edit by 7a the next day. So not my favorite already. So we wait for 30 min. then someone comes in and says the person that called the meeting got called into another meeting and can’t meet with us. Apparently this is pretty common too. I have to adjust to the business culture here. At least I can recognize the mistakes I’ve made so far. Hopefully there still is enough time to fix the problem. So that elusive light at the end of the tunnel is still out there…but it is just beyond my reach. But…I think everything on our end will be wrapped up by Thursday’s new deadline. We are hitting all our deadlines, but they just keep changing the projects. Wouldn’t you know it…Thursday’s deadline is Thursday Oct. 29, pretty much 6 weeks almost exactly when God told me the next six weeks would be difficult. Im almost there.
I have to get into the office early because client from project #3 is coming in for a final edit. We had to completely re-voice the script. That means I had to go in and subtitle each line. That is so tedious. But I got it done. This project is one of higher profile projects so Im working on it on my own. It really is quite fabulous. But the client kept rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, so its not as good as it once was…but it still is quality.
Khalifa reasons that each project that we complete is a five months project. So essentially we completed 3 – five months projects in the span of 7 months. Im very proud about that.
I talked about my kids and thanksgiving yesterday. Please pray for me and them so that they will have a change of heart. Your prayers for the restoration of my relationship with them is greatly appreciated. Prayers work.
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