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.