The First Cut is the Deepest
October 30, 2006
This morning I finished the rough cut of the short film.
About bloody time.
It's been both fun and a chore to log the footage, sort the footage, and arrange the footage. After spending far too much time on this rough edit, I've gotten a much better understanding of myself as both a director and writer: how well is what's on the page on the screen? What shortcuts did I take that I shouldn't have? What shortcuts could have been taken that weren't. What did I need more footage of? Less?
Something I stumbled across that really helped me in the rough edit was advice from Walter Murch to turn the sound off when doing the first edit and just let the images guide your hand. Revealatory. Without worrying about the audio being right for the scene, I focused instead on getting the faces, relationships an reactions to be close to what I thought I was "right" for the scene.
When I played the scene back, I was surprised to find that the audio track was far closer to what it should be than I thought. There were a few times when I'd even timed the cuts exactly to the breaks in the dialogue. While it's possible I'm cherry picking my data points, remembering my hits and forgetting my misses, there was the feeling of freedom that came from sublimating concerns over the audio appropriateness at this stage and focusing instead on the visual.
So too, much like with writing where problems in the written narrative get worked out at non-writing times with flashes of insight into the direction a particular story should take, I've discovered that problems in the narrative of the film, kinks where I wasn't sure how to edit something to take best advantage of the available footage, were solved in a similar, minding-my-own-business flash of insight. ("If I just take this edit here and place it before that edit there...") Fascinating how the brain works.
Now comes the tinkering part, where I play with the cuts, angles and performances to create the best tale I can tell. I'm really excited by this, much like how excited much more excited I am to edit a 100 page script than to actually produce each and every page of it in the first place.
I might just make my goal of having a "mostly done" movie by the first of December.
Posted by Jody at October 30, 2006 01:21 PM
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Comments
Jody,
I really enjoyed reading about your process here with making your film. My husband is a film music composer and has worked on numerous films in the past and I've seen him go through a similar process. One thing I know for sure is that once you finish your project you will have a lot to be proud of. I look forward to following your progress.
Have a nice day :)
Posted by: Stacy L. Harp ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://WWW.nakedwriting.COM/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 31, 2006 10:44 AM
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