10 Things I Learned Finishing my feature film or Paying Back $10,000

Boy oh boy was June filled with surprises

Jun 30, 2026

Well I was in magical fantasy land thinking I was going to be able to do weekly updates on how June was going as well as daily notes…that did not happen And here we are at the end of June.

In this article, I wrote about the serious deadline I had this month of needing to get the rough cut of my film completed and submitted. The kind of deadline that mean real consequences, where if I did not deliver a rough cut of my feature film by June 30th, I would have to repay $10,000 in grant money I no longer had (because I spent it to shoot the thing.)

So I finished it.

It took everything I had. My kids kept asking me if I was ok because I would come up from editing only to cook dinner and just be walking around the kitchen tapping my chest and taking long deep breaths in an futile attempt to calm my nervous system.

Here are the ten things I learned (even as an experienced post pro.)

1. You cannot fully know what post will look like until you are in it

Listen, I went into June thinking I had a plan. I’m a freaking pro at this whole post thing anyways right? I had a schedule, I had a timeline, I had broken down the script and had a rough idea of how long everything would take. And then June happened and the plan went out the door.

Post-production is inherently unpredictable. Not because you planned wrong, but because you are working with living material, footage that surprises you, a story that reveals itself differently in the edit than it did on the page, collaborators whose availability shifts, and technology that has its own agenda entirely. You can and should plan. But you have to hold the plan loosely and stay ready to adapt, because post will always show you something you did not see coming.

2. Post runs on technology and tech is unpredictable - always have a backup plan

In June I was trying to color grade a film in Premiere using a color mode I had not used before. Partly because I hadn’t color graded in Resolve for 5 years and my imposter syndrome sat in real fast. I thought if I could keep it all in premiere and get through the simple grade quick it would save me a lot of time. Boy was that a bad call (I know better.) I did get a full grade out in Premiere, the producer even approved it. And then premiere went haywire in a way that corrupted what I had already done and left me stuck having to redo a full grade in Resolve now making it even harder on myself having to match the grade from Premiere that was already approved.

This is post-production. This is just what it is. Technology is the river you are always crossing and the bridge is always a little shakier than it looks. Back up everything, more than you think you need to. Have a secondary workflow ready. And when the technology breaks :: not if, when :: try to treat it as information rather than catastrophe. Panic doesn’t server anyone. Learn from it and keep going.

3. Life does not pause for your deadline, and that is okay - plan accordingly

June is swim team month in our house. Every year. Swim meets, practices, drop-offs, pick-ups. My kids are home from school which means camps and carpools and the kind of logistics that feel like a part-time job on top of everything else. My mother-in-law ended up in the hospital for a night. My husband started a new in office job (😭.) The life that surrounds the work did not slow down because I had a deadline.

It never does. And at some point I had to stop being frustrated by that and start building it into the plan honestly. Not keep pretending I would have 8-10 uninterrupted hours every day when I knew I would not. Not scheduling deep work during the hours I would be doing school pickup. Remember to enjoy your life, it’s the whole point of doing your work in the first place. I scheduled my deep work time later at night, the hubs took care of bedtime so I could spend my evenings getting the type of focus I wasn’t going to get during the day.

4. I can only focus on one project at a time - splitting focus creates diminishing returns

This month I was on three projects simultaneously.

my feature film
film going to Amazon
a feature airing in July that was supposed to wrap in May and kept extending into June

Every time I had to shift between them I lost time. Not just the minutes of the shift itself but the ramp-up time to get back to depth on each one, the mental residue of the other projects bleeding into my focus, the constant context switching that makes everything take longer and feel harder.

I think of it like going deep underwater. The deeper I can go into one project, the faster and more creatively I can work. But if I keep having to surface for another project and then go back down, I am always working in the shallow end.

5. Deep work is the only work that actually moves a film to the finish line

The emails, the calls, the admin, the scheduling, the exporting, the checking in. None of that is what finishes a film. It is necessary. But it is not the whole thing. THE thing is the hours where you are fully inside the material, where you have forgotten what time it is, where the story is speaking to you and you are listening. Those hours are rare and they are everything. Guard them like they are the most valuable resource you have.

6. The phase of life you are in determines how much deep work you can access - again plan accordingly

This one is harder to say out loud. When I was in film school I could go deep into a project for twelve hours straight and come up for air and go back down. That kind of sustained, uninterrupted focus was available to me in a way it simply is not right now. I have a mortgage, children who need to be fed and driven places, a household that does not run itself, and a nervous system that has limits I cannot ignore the way I could at twenty-two.

Jon Acuff talks about this concept in his new book Procrastination Proof (#not an ad) and it gave me so much mental clarity that it’s ok to respect the phase i’m in and play to my own phase’s strengths.

The deep work is still there. I can still access it. I can even access it more quickly because I have practice, and have the capacity to tell deeper richer stories now based on my lived experience, but I cannot pretend I have the same energy I had in a different phase of my life. Planning as though I do just creates shame when the reality does not match the fantasy.

7. A team will always finish a film faster than you alone

One of the things that saved me in June was my producing partner and his wife stepping in to take a significant portion of the film and string it out while I handled the insanity that was unfolding for me in June. What was supposed to be tight but doable quickly turned into, there’s no way I can do this on my own and not have a nervous breakdown. But the two of them rolled up their sleeves and dug in hard, and got the rest of the 90 page done that by the third week in June I realized I was not going to get to. I cannot fully put into words what that felt like except to say it felt like being able to breathe again.

I spent years believing that doing it myself was the only way to do it right. I have also learned every possible role there is to know in post because I needed to be able to gives notes/supervise in a way where I could ensure it was happening in the best possible way. But I’m not saying follow that examples.

8. Asking for help is not a failure - it is how films get finished

This one is different from the team lesson. That one is about workflow. This one is about identity. There is a version of me that would rather exhaust myself past a reasonable limit than admit I need help, the truth about not wanting to ask for help was more than I felt like a failure that it had taken me this long to force time into my crazy busy life to edit on this film for free, but now we’re down to the wire and I failed. But I’ll write another whole article about that feeling in general when it comes to NonDē filmmakers as I’ve realized I’m not alone.

9. Mom filmmakers carry a specific mental load that is real, valid, and worth naming

I want to say clearly that my partner is involved, present, and genuinely helpful. This is not about blame. But there is something that happens in my brain that I do not fully know how to turn off, a constant low-level monitoring of everyone’s needs, schedules, emotional states, and logistics that runs underneath everything else I am doing. It is not always conscious. It is just there, and it wasn’t before I become a mom.

That mental load takes up space. It takes up space that would otherwise be available for the work. And for a long time I felt like I was supposed to just manage it silently and not let it affect my output, because acknowledging it felt like making excuses. But the thing is it affects the work and the timeline and the capacity I have available on any given day. If my kid runs down a hill to fast on her scooter and falls head over heels onto the sidewalk, and I get a call from an amazon driver who stopped her route to help my kid in panic, then there goes my entire edit day (true story.)

10. The shame about how long things take in post is not talked about enough

I finished this rough cut and I still felt ashamed. Ashamed that it took as long as it did, ashamed that I needed help to get there, ashamed that I love this film so much and it still was not done.

Nobody talks about this. Post-production shame is everywhere and it is invisible. The project that has been in post for two years. The actors reaching out for their footage because surely a year later it should be done enough to get their footage. We do not talk about it because admitting it feels like admitting we are actually not capable of doing what we say we are. I have 300+ credits to my name of films/shows that made it fully finish to the theater or to air and I still struggle with this.

So if you’ve ever felt any guilt for how long post is taking you, you’re not alone.

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