For those of you who listen to The Extended Edition, you'll know by now what the Traveler is.
In short, it's a web series revolving around a Time Lord in the Doctor Who universe known as the Traveler. Or Travis, for short.

We started pre-production in February and had nothing but trouble with this until June. In late June, we started production, which lasted for two days, after losing our script writer for no apparent reason, and the lead actor. We were lucky enough to get both replaced with no more than two weeks notice until production, and it really shows in the footage. I was never 100% happy with what we shot, but made due with what we had.

Post production was done throughout July, with several VFX artists helping out, editing being locked, and ADR sessions undertaken. Everything was going as smoothly as it could, all things considered.

But then the worst thinkable thing happened. A hard drive crash managed to rid me of all the footage, all project files, ADR files and anything even slightly related to TRAVIS. The only thing I'm left with is VFX plates for two shots, and a "locked" edit of the first episode, neatly tucked onto youtube. So, in THEORY, we could download it off of youtube, and work on that. Practically, this isn't even a slightly viable option, and now we're left with starting from scratch.

So what has this taught us? A couple of things.
1. Plan better. Run and Gun doesn't always work. We didn't plan out the production well enough, and it really shows in the footage.
2. BACK THE FUCK UP EVERYTHING ALWAYS.
3. Don't assume your friends can act. Even though Magnus did a stellar job based on the fact that he can't act, and took directions very well, it's not up on the level I wanted it to be.
4. Keep buying the cast and crew pizza. They love it.
5. Never give a script writer 1 week to write an episode. Just don't. It'll be compromised and it won't be as good as you hoped it would be.
6. BACK THE FUCK UP EVERYTHING ALWAYS.

So, what now?
Well, a couple of options. Either I just scrap the whole project altogether, or, I get the original crew back, including the main man for the episode, who has time to do it these days, as opposed to a month or so ago, pick a better location, plan it out better, even storyboard it, film the hell out of it, and back it all up on a daily basis.

This also gives me an oppurtunity to do what I originally wanted: to shoot it in RAW. I'm getting a 5D Mark II, which is very able to shoot RAW, whilst recording sound separately. It'll give the image a better treatment, and I think I'll be way happier with the footage this time around.

Any tips here? I'm rewriting the script to be closer to 10-20 minutes than the actual 5-ish minutes this one turned out to be.

And, as a bonus, since it'll never see the light of day anyway, here's the aforementioned youtube video:

EDIT: The Black Magic Cinema Camera 2.5K just dropped a whopping $1000USD. Should I take that into consideration? The crop factor is pretty ugly(at 3x35mm), but the quality is rad.