Well, I can't comment on the camera aspect of things but having worked on and attempted to produce a couple of just short projects not even HALF as technical as yours, I would say that you've learned a lot. Giving the script writer plenty of time to hammer that out.

Um, yeah, not all my friends can act (I don't even think I can very well) so being picky, choosy, and selective are your friend, even in a project like this.

Do you have someone who can storyboard? How long is the lead man available?

Erich: He's basically always available, just not in the window we had; he's my brother. Second lead in WHOISH!.
Drew: I've had hard drives fail on me before. This, however, is a new one. Shouldn't have failed.

Tom, new drives fail on me all the time, I don't trust them until I've burned them in. I've probably warrantied a dozen drives in my life, some just click-dead when you plug them in, but some seem okay for a while until they get hot. I decided it was best to expect them to fail and have redundancy, sometimes multiple redundancy.

BDA,
Simplest is a Win7 mirror. Install two identical drives, then use Disk Manager to set them up.

Next step up is a mobo mirror (RAID 1), if your board supports it. These perform better, but I worry about the data if the mobo dies.

Next up again is a dedicated add-in card that provides RAID capability. I have one that communicates to a pair of little SanDigital 'toasters' with 4 drive bays each. I run those as RAID 10: two drives are paired up to (almost) double read/write speed, then that data is cloned to the other 2 paired-up the same way. I have lost drives from this array several times, and power supplies in the toaster boxes themselves, data survived.

Finally, I like the Western Digital 2-drive NAS boxes set up as mirrored. Slower, but you can put them in another room for disaster security on critical data; irreplaceable family photos and such. Newegg just had a 4T on sale for $280, and I see it's just arrived at my house...that'll bring me up to 36T spread over 8 IP addresses, not counting boot-drives. All of that is mirrored or RAID5, so I have something like half that in actual capacity.

We had time tables. They were just downright ignored. The scriptwriter I hired decided to go AWOL after a month or so without doing anything. He was even promised money for the job.

But now, we've an already shot film that showcases where we went wrong, and what to improve on it. Writing it myself shouldn't be that hard this time around.

The only purpose of something like this is to have fun. If that's not happening, there's no point. Set it aside as lessons learned, I say. Start over when you've got the WHOLE THING scripted out, not just the first ep.

That said, the script is alright. And you're acting is terrific. The camera work needs to come up three notches to match.

You'll all also be incredibly happy to know that "Road Trip" was on the same disk.

Which is now being run through by a little app called Disk Drill, courtesy of work. Thus far, it's managed to pinpoint 1500 video files, and is plowing them all back into reality.

Managed to recover what I believe is 99% of the shots from the Traveler, and the Road Trip. They're currently named video_0001.mov and so forth, due to the filenames being lost, meaning I'll have to cut everything again. The road trip is a pain in the ass to edit to begin with. Now, without any sort of ...sorting, this'll be.. well, fun.

Unless they're still on the FTP and I can just download them in the correct order again

TRAVIS has to be edited again, if at all. Losing the files taught me a lot. It doesn't look the way I wanted it to, and it certainly doesn't sound good at all. I don't know. I'll complete it, and once it's done, I may even release it. If not publically, I'll show it around.

I have a week off of work and am more than willing to help write. Not sure if I can fill the gaps but I am willing to at least try.