I was up to three o’clock Saturday morning pulling together the first rough edit, and boy, did I pay for it the next day. I spent the whole weekend in a fug, which was a shame as it was our first chance in a few weeks to have some quality time with our son.
I was so tired I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the final edit all the way through, I had this really awful feeling it was going to be Bad, so Lucy watched it first and gave me the thumbs up. I watched it saturday night and fell into a huge bad mood. It was by no means good. Well, not that bad, but the tiredness of burning the midnight oil for so many weeks had finally caught up with me and I just didn’t ever want to see a triangular book again.
My biggest problem was the opening five minutes, with no opening credits and no music it just didn’t feel right. I kept trying to force myself to look past these as I knew that they would come in time, but it still didn’t sit right.
I avoided it all day Sunday, only pausing at my PC once to export a copy off so I could watch it at work yesterday. This I duly did once lunchtime had rolled around and, thanks to two early nights, my fresher eyes saw the problem immediately, the whole first scene, the graveyard scene, didn’t work.
It painted Alice as a bit of a cow and Jess as a bit spineless and whiny. No, no, no, no it’ll have to go. And then what? I can’t start with the Dr Crabtree scene, it won’t make sense. What about if I swap the second and third scenes around? That would work. The book shop scene is nice and strong anyway (it was the last scene we did and Vickie had really got into the stride of things by then), so now that’s first.
As soon as I got in yesterday I set about cutting and pasting. It still wasn’t quite right though, it started too quick. Off to Flash to make some dummy opening credits, add a bit of Ludovico Einaudi for effect – oh yes, much better.
Only problem is that suddenly the first five minutes were much stronger and the mistakes and troublespots throughout the rest of the film came very much into sharp relief.
Still I was feeling a whole lot better about it. It was weighing in at fouteen and a half minutes, still way too long for my liking. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find enough to cut out to shorten it, so this morning I fired off an e-mail to UK Independent Film Making Guru Chris Jones. I remembered that he had mentioned in his seminar the other week that he had been quite mercenary editing his films and been very pleased with the results, so I asked if he had any tips. Here’s what he said…
‘Get into every scene as late as poss and get out ASAP. Try trimming the end off every scene, even losing dialogue, see if it still works. Anything that does not serve the story should go. Try anything and see how it feels.’ I’ve taken these words to heart and, along with tidying up the glitches I’ve already shaved a good thirty seconds off, and I’m not even halfway through it yet. Should work out a treat.
I also e-mailed Jo at Screen South, see if she could point me in the direction of any other local filmmakers who might be able to cast an objective eye on progress. She came back wanting more information the project and mooting the possibility of meeting up next week, which would be cool.
Still feel shattered though, so I’m off to bed to read more Brave New World…