On Wednesday night I edited together the scene where we first meet Dr Crabtree. It was late when I finished it so I went to bed without really looking at it, just vaguely pleased with myself that I had one more scene I could pass across to Daz to start working on ideas for the score.
Yesterday morning Lucy wanted to watch what I’d done, so I showed her. Her reaction surprised me a little. ‘Ugh! I can’t watch that! What happened? It’s too fast!’
I watched it back, and realised that she was right. The scene was flaccid, lifeless and completely lacked emotion. And to a certain extent it didn’t make a lot of sense. I went to work in a huge depression.
I couldn’t work out where the spark had gone. I remember watching the scene thinking that there had been some great moments between Dr C and Jess. Where did they go? The dialogue was all there, the story was there (so I thought), so what was wrong?
I hunted about a bit on the Internet, trying to find tips on editing. Perhaps it was me, maybe the first couple of scenes had been flukes and I actually had no talent for editing whatsoever. I failed to find anything useful on the web. I dug out my Film School CD and went back through the advice on editing there. Nope, got all that – cut on the action… blah blah blah.
The only thing I thought I could try was to make it a litttle longer and stretch out some of the cuts. As the scene only ran to forty seconds, I thought I could afford to find an extra five or ten. Perhaps slowing the pacing down might help?
As soon as I got home I attacked it, stretching out pauses and delaying reactions just a touch.
I tinkered for a bit trying this and that, and then I found it. The subtext. It was there in between the dialogue. The looks, the reactions, that I’d cut out to keep a jaunty flow of dialogue, suddenly loaded each sentence with weight. Emotion flooded in.
Where before there had been two people talking at each other, now there were two people try to affect each other, and we the humble viewers suddenly became part of that.
And I only added five seconds to the scene.
I tell you, it’s epiphany central round my house at the moment.
3 comments
Fun Joel says:
July 1, 2005 at 4:50 pm (UTC 1 )
Dude. Your second truly insightful posting this week! I commend you, and am enjoying trailing your process as you go through it.
On editing, you might check out Walter Murch’s brilliant book, In the Blink of an Eye.
And your discovery reminded me of one of the more famous acting maxims: Acting is reacting. If you just cover the dialogue, you never allow your characters the time to react!
Andy says:
July 1, 2005 at 11:19 pm (UTC 1 )
Cheers for the encouragement Fun Joel.
I promise I’ll get back to the screenwriting ASAP, make sure I stay on your blog roll!
Shouldn’t be too long, all this filmmaking malarky is giving huge amounts of inspiration. Thank God I keep my PDA on me the whole time, it’s never seen so much action in the past week or so, making notes for future projects…
Fun Joel says:
July 3, 2005 at 8:44 am (UTC 1 )
Don’t worry, I’ll leave you on there. Good luck. Cheers!