I'm waiting for another couple gigs to tranfer to the backup drive so I can go to sleep and not worry about the last few hours (and by extension, few months) of work going up in smoke via bad computer mojo while I sleep (it happens! don't think it doesn't).

Jonathan Pitts, producer of the Chicago Improv Festival came to me in January (mid-January, let's be clear -- I've only had 3 months, not 3 1/2) to talk about the intro video for the mainstage of this year's CIF. I did the one they used last year and it was a nice piece of eye candy, but it didn't really say anything (and yes, I did it at the very last minute). This year, Jonathan said, the goal for the whole festival was to not treat it as a surprise when April rolled around. (Which is exactly and precisely what I always do -- oh, Jonathan you can see my darkest secrets.) And the idea for the intro video was to use it to do a little education about the Compass Players -- the first modern improv ensemble -- on their 50th anniversary.

Well, yay, I said and left the Golden Apple scribbling in my little notebook ideas for different ways of combining historical footage and modern interviews and "Ken Burns" fades and so on and so forth. And I had plenty of time, right? Three months!

And I just finished. Which is an improvement on last year -- last year I was rendering video in the dressing room of the Athenaeum at 6:15 or so on opening night of the festival. Lookee me -- there's 16 hours until curtain!

I'll probably want to fiddle with parts of it tomorrow, but it's done enough that I could show it to 1000 people at the mainstage and not be embarassed. And there's a chance that the people watching might get a little bit (a tiny bit) of an education about who the Compass Players were and what they did that was so cool.