Making a Reel: What is this Nightmare?!?

Some of you might remember me writing a post in which I optimistically talked about how I was getting my reel together and all the exciting doors that could open for me once I had one. All I had to do was get the footage together! Well, that was more than a month ago. Here's what I've run into.

I want my reel to consist of my segments on 1000 Ways to Die and Operation Repo, my zombie PSA, Melvin Becomes a Man, and Dude Tips. As you may have noticed from all the hyperlinks, all of these clips can be found on the internet. So it should be super easy to collect all the footage, right? ...Right?

Let me say first off that Youtube is awesome. All you have to do to lift a Youtube video is put the url on www.keepvid.com and it takes care of everything for ya.

1000 Ways to Die and Operation Repo is where I'm having problems. My clips are streaming on their respective websites, and are protected against greedy little data thieves like myself. Okay, fair enough. But these shows have employed hundreds of actors, surely all I have to do is just email the folks from the show, and they'll send it right to me!

Psh. One show sent me an email that said "we don't send original copies to actors" whereas the other one just flat out never got back to me after two straight weeks of emailing, I guess in the hopes that eventually I'll buzz off

Looks like I'm on my own with these two.

Well, nothing like shelling out four bucks on iTunes to buy an TV episode that you're featured in. But I did that for 1000 WTD, only to discover that iTunes won't let me convert the file into a format that I can edit with. Even tried to use it on crappy iMovie, still wouldn't work. Bought iSkysoft Converter. Won't work. The episode is just sitting on my computer, and I can't use it.

Repo doesn't even have my episode on iTunes... Crap.

As of now, I'm waiting on my Dad to try some wizardry with his DVR to see if he can get Repo off of it. Still not sure what I'm gonna do about 1000 WTD.

You know what the funny part is? Once I actually have all the footage, stringing it all together into a rough cut will take fifteen minutes, tops.