Project disappeared

I am beside myself as I was finishing a project ready to be delivered by 4:00 PM Tuesday afternoon, and it now has disappeared.

My MBP was put to sleep over night, and as I was continuing with the project this morning I noticed that the sound track was muted, even though the mute button had NOT been activated. Fiddling around with the sound settings changed nothing.

I decided to do a complete shut down of the computer, wait a few seconds and rebooted (cold start). After everything was running, I opened iMovie 10.0.2. It got stuck bouncing endlessly in the dock. I brought up 'Force Quit,' which indicated that iMovie was not responding. I was unable to force quit, as the orange ball kept spinning. I was forced to crash the computer (command-control-powerkey). After the Mac came back, and I opened iMovie..., my project was missing.

Once more I did a complete shut down and cold start. My project was still missing. I am convinced that at the iMovie crash something got corrupted.

When I go into the iMovie library and open the package, my project is still there, with the 'CurrentVersion.imovieevent' displaying the correct time stamp when last worked on. However, when double clicking on it a text file with a lot of gobbledigook comes up.

Is there a way to salvage my project? Ironically, I was just about to hook up my external diskdrive to run a Time Machine back-up.

Hours of work!! Deadline looming!

Please help!!

Klaus