Hand Processing a Film or Back to the Drawing Board

So yesterday was the hand processing class for my Winnipeg Film Group course on 16mm filmmaking. Faithful readers will remember that a little over a month ago, I shot a film with some friends. The interesting thing with film is that you have no idea if anything worked until you actually process the stuff. I had hope for most of the shoot, since we were careful metering shots and had good lighting, for the most part.
Hand processing is fairly easy, simply an extension on photo processing, with the major difference being that you must be in COMPLETE darkness (thus turning you into a blindly groping touch machine). A couple of people went before me and their stuff looked great, you could clearly see the images and whatnot. Then it came to me... the first go was awful. The film was almost all black, with a few images of Jay running... bummer... Then I remembered that the first roll was the one where I wasn't sure how much was left, so we ended it early. Hope!
Everyone else was leaving after doing their little section, as we had booked times during the week to finish. One of the profs was staying till the scheduled time of 6pm (we began at 10am) and said that I could stay and work more if I wanted. I'm glad I did, because I was able to use the extra time to finish processing all my footage, learn to use the Steinbeck machine, and go through all my stuff to determine what was going to go into the final project.
Here's the thing though... NOTHING TURNED OUT. Everything we filmed was underexposed. I had maybe 20 seconds tops of properly exposed footage and it all was somehow solarized. It turns out that when using a bolex camera, you have to open the f-stop a half a stop for what you meter. I guess I missed that memo, because no one else really had the same problems that I did... So I have 3 rolls of film that included massive blackness, a few brief scenes of Jay running, and solarized faces and body outlines (which actually look kinda cool). My movie is gone to the ether! Basically all that is left for me to do is try to scratch animate something. My prof suggested that I take all the solarized footage and, using the optical printer, make more of it. The only problem is that we do not have any teaching on that particular machine (it's for a different class), so I'll have to save that task for another day.
If there is one thing that I love about DV, it's how you are able to tell RIGHT AWAY if you are doing something right. With the proper PC, you can start editing within hours. You can playback what you were filming on the spot, so know if you fucked up or not. There is a real sense of immediacy. While film has that certain "look" to it that's yet to be duplicated digitally, it is definitely a more unforgiving medium. Anyway, back to the drawing board!