Help needed recovering project files from trash

Hi everyone, I am hoping that someone will be able to help me. I just did something stupid!

I created two new projects in iMovie this morning and then needed to clear out the mac in order to speed up a clip as I was getting the warning that my disk was full. So I copied a lot of files from iPhoto onto a hard drive and then moved them to trash including the raw files that I was using for these projects. (I got a bit carried away!) Yes the video files were in iPhoto and not iMovie Events as the last time I uploaded files iMovie was not playing the game.

The files are still on the mac as I have not emptied the trash and they are also backed up on an external drive connected to the mac, but I have emptied the iPhoto trash. I tried importing the files back into iPhoto from trash and only got so far before the disk full message came up again. But even those ones that I did manage to re import are not showing up.

Is there any way that I can continue with these projects or have I effectively ruined them? Do I need to start again from scratch? I hope not as they took me hours and hours to create and had pretty much finished them.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :-)