My son's recent comment, "That's just sounds like a metric assload of work! Talk about a labor of love. :)", on my DVD project got me to thinking. Ok why am I doing this? and Why am I willing to put out so much energy and time to do it? This opens up many thoughts.
Back in my camping and hiking days, I recall usually hauling out more garbage than I came with when I left. Or making sure things were better than when I first found it. I got a lot of self-satisfaction out of that. I could probably boil up several examples, but basically it points to my need to fix things or make things better than it is to start with.
So to answer my two questions I would say I'm doing it because that's who I am and I care.
While editing my video frame by frame, I have to make decisions as to what to fix and how that fix will effect the overall picture while maintaining the integrity of the origional. Fortunately, there is an undo and I have saved the origional frames just in case. We can't do that in life though.
There often times that we may identify something in our lives as needing fixing. Somethings being easy, and some thing's being hard. There is likely no undo but on occation we are afforded the opportunity of a do-over. I suppose to realize something is wrong and be willing to do something about it would require one to care how other people view our personal movie. Just a few bad frames, doesn't always ruin the movie and most likely will go unnoticed or just overlooked. These you have to find by yourself.
Fixing your personal movie can be a long tedious task. We just can't edit out entire sections of our lives like you can a video. What we can do though is look at a problem frame-by-frame and make "little" changes that ultimately improves and maintains the origional integrity of our movie.
We are who we are but we can be better and our movie can be better. Anybody who saw your movie before and hated it. would probably never give it a second look. This would be true likely even if you did something drastic to it like changing genres. Only people who truely love care about you will afford you that. For this to happen though, we need to be one of the people who love you.
So basically what Im saying here is "Labors of Love" start by loving yourself. There is only 1 deadline to meet and we are in total control of the production of our movie...frame-by-frame.
If your movie is constantly getting better, then likely people viewing the final cut will fast forward the old VCR to the good parts and watch it from there. We have to keep in mind that we also won't be around to put in the credits in the end of the movie. A very important thing to remember.
The very best you can do is to let the people who make a difference in your life aware of the fact they do well in advance of the end of the movie....Be wierd put the credits in the middle.