I’m mildly excited at the moment as this weekend I’m helping Ken Colley shoot a little short which I’ll be editing for him. He’s hiring a Canon XL-H1 for the shoot, so it’ll be my first foray into the world of Hi-Def (albeit HDV).

I’m hoping to have the first cut of Voice of Silence finished by the weekend so I can put it away while I do Ken’s short (it’s only 6 pages long, so I doubt it’ll take too long to edit). The edit is coming together nicely, though my version will be significantly shorter than Chris’s original one and half hour cut.

I’ve four sequences left to edit and it’s currently running at 35 minutes, so I’ll doubt my version will come in much over 45 minutes. With credits and a little TLC to sort out pacing and introduce some of the concepts that Chris picked up on in shooting which aren’t in the script, I reckon it’ll be about an hour.

Ken’s short, ‘Alligator’, is almost a prequel to House of Donn, inasmuch as he plays a character very similar to the one he played in HoD. It’ll be interesting to see how he directs as well. I’ll try to take a few snapshots along the way…

The editing and writing continues full pelt filling all my spare time, but the process has been aided by three new Good Things I’ve started using.

The first Good Thing is Dave’s progress trackers. I’m not sure why I never used them before, they give me an enormous amount of satisfaction when I update them. The thought of getting them both to 100% Christmas is an excellent incentive. (Though I did have to tweak the style sheet to make it work in IE7 and Firefox 2).

The second Good Thing I’ve discovered is the Puk – a wrist rest that slides about so you can move your mouse arm freely and still keep it in a non-RSI inducing position. This is very handy as even though I’m using the keyboard shortcuts (JKL etc), there’s still a lot of clicking and dragging involved with editing. (Tip: initially I found that it kept hitting the bottom side of the mouse mat which was a little frustrating – then I realised that I could turn the mouse mat round 90 degrees and put the puk on the bottom half of the mat – sorted).

The third Good Thing, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is Tim Clague’s Scriptwriter’s Life diagram. This is a really useful diagram/chart type thing to have about you at all times – either on the desktop or printed out and stuck up somewhere nearby. It’s very detailed and Tim has been expanding on the ideas on his blog. I do recommend you check it out if you haven’t already. It’s covers all the bases, a lot of which people like Messr’s Field and McKee et al don’t cover, but are still just as important if you want to be a successful screenwriter, especially the networking and social aspects of screenwriting (or gaining ‘Gravity’ as Tim neatly puts it).

Now back to the editing – I believe the clergyman is about to have his face thrust into his disturbingly realistic and very full toilet bucket… there’s a lot of violence in this film and yet I still find the toilet buckets the most disturbing aspects of the whole thing.

Chris came round last night to view the first five minutes or so of edited footage.

By way of back story to the whole Voice of Silence project, it was actually written and shot back in 1998 over two weeks (in the building next door to where Charlie Chaplin grew up). Due to the unusual ‘narrative’ structure of the film, using fragments of real letters from people in concentration camps and detention centres, it was shot silent.

Chris took it to a couple of editors and ended up with a mono edit that ran to an hour and a half or so, but hadn’t, I don’t think, got it really how he wanted it. It seems to have lain fallow since then, until I appeared on the scene.

Even though he was happy about my proposal that I wouldn’t watch the full mono edit and just do an Andy Coughlan version of the film, I was more than a bit nervous about showing him what I’d done as I’ve taken, well, not so much liberties, as applied some creative attention to the material. I’ve attempted to find more dramatic strands within the footage, where before I think he’d envisaged it a lot more ponderous and ‘arthousey’.

As it happened, he likes the way I’m taking it, so I’ll now carry on working my way through it. He had a few suggestions, but they all fitted in with what I’ve done. Chris is away for a fortnight now, so that gives me a useful deadline to get somewhere near a complete edit done before he returns… Then we can have fun playing with it before Daz gets really stuck into it.

After an excellent meeting betwixt Chris, Darren and Myself last Thursday evening, I’ve spent every spare moment I’ve had sorting and organising all the shots for the film.

It’s fascinating to see how the film morphed as it was shot, with scenes being improved or added, or simply changed where budget or location prevented ideas being done.

I just finished sorting the last few shots (there was 4 hours 40 minutes of good footage!). I’m really starting to get the film ‘into my guts’ as one of my college lecturers used to say.

Daz and I are planning to work really hard on the first and last ten minutes of the film to begin with, so once an assembly edit is done, I’ll do a reasonably fine cut of those sequences so Daz can be working on the music.

After that, Chris is keen to try out some multi-frame shots and be a bit funky and clever. I’m starting to see which sequences this might work well with.

I’m listening to lots of Ludovico Einaudi, Nitin Sawhney and William Orbit to get me in the right mood, so I’m generally feeling very chilled.

Found the fix to my Canon XM-1 (GL-1 to our US cousins) big fat ugly ‘Remove the Cassette’ issue.

I just had to manually rewind the tapes a little and hey presto they worked. I’m a bit suspicious that the camera may have messed the tape a bit, but as the two main problems occurred in the space between reels on the tape, I can’t tell. They both played and captured fine after that.

So that’s the whole feature now onto the hard disk drive.

Next step – assembly edit (once I’ve figured out the best way to organise all the subclips).

Have spent the past few days getting to grips with Chris’s film. He dropped off the tapes last week and explained a little about the film. Since then I’ve been reading the script and going through the information he already had on a portable hard disk drive.

I guess it’s a sign of improving technology, but the encoded video on the disk drive is only a quarter size, so I’ve decided to re-import the whole film again.

Alas I have come a little unstiuck at the moment as, after importing eight roles of film sithout a hitch, I suddenly found I couldn’t import with the timecode activated. Very frustrating.

To compound matters, I have a Canon XM-1 which apparently have a well known bug whereby if you play and rewind a lot in the same place on the tape, the camera throws a wobbly and refuses to read the tape, displaying an angry red notice across the screen, ‘Remove Tape!’

So, yes, guess what happened while I was trying to fix the capture problem (which I did, but in a rather cack handed fasion – still a fix is a fix). Yup, big red angry message, just at the start of reel nine. Grrr. It did it again on another tape, yet later decidided to forgive that tape and I’ve captured it now. What a pain. So now I need to find someone else locally with a mini-dv player or camcorder to get the last of the footage onto my disk drive. Double Grrr.

The film itself is quite interesting. It’s about three people in a detention centre/concentration camp, and you know they aren’t coming out again.

The ‘experimental’ aspect of the film is that there is no dialogue, just voiceovers, which are excerpts of real letters from people in concentration camps. Quite moving stuff.

As there’s no dialogue (apart from the occasional voiceover) I think music is going to play a very important part in the film, driving it forward. Thus I have enlisted the assistance of my highly esteemed colleague and friend Darren Miller to work on the music and sound.

It’s odd coming at the project from the outside like this. I’m pondering how best to proceed. Logging the shots and finding which bits of footage relate which bits of the script is the first task, but I’m minded to have a go a Walter Murch’s photo montage idea as well, where you take three or four keys shots from the best takes and put them up on a board. Then you shuffle them about a bit to shake you brain up and free it from the linear structure of the script.

Could be fun.