The cash from the Kickstarter pledge drive has rolled in, and I’ve celebrated by making our biggest purchases yet. All two of them!

The big order was $94.00 for a 2TB external hard drive. Not only will this make it possible for us to actually store an entire feature’s worth of footage, it’ll make it easy for us to transfer files from laptop to laptop as we trade off various effects and editing duties.

The other purchase: $41.17 for a dry erase clapboard. I had briefly considered skipping the use of a production slate altogether – when it comes to marking shots and syncing sound, a simple dry erase board (or even notebook paper) and an on-camera hand clap will do the job just fine – but I figured forty bucks for a pinch of professionalism is worth the investment. As with the hard drive, the clapboard can be used on future projects, and possibility of reuse is vital when it comes to low- and no-budget productions.

The next few weeks should see the budget shoot up even more, as we go shopping for various necessities for next weekend’s effects tests. (Speaking of which, “Will this mixture of not-meat stuff look like actual meat on camera?” sounds like the worst Mythbusters episode ever.)