A belated update

For the past two weeks, Kenneth Price has been editing the film with myself sitting in on the proceeds for the last week. The film is taking shape in a major way. And I am very excited.

The very first rough cut I saw proved to be true to what I thought might happen. And that is that the sequence in the middle of the film that was written out of chronological order does not play as well as it does in chronological order. I am ok with this as in its previous state, we were concerned that it will confuse the audience and ultimately lose the pace and tone of the film as it builds towards the end.

Last week we had a scary moment when the hard drive crashed and took all of our stored footage with it!!! This would not be the end of everything as we still would have had the actual tapes from the camera but even so, three days of loading it into the computer would have been a nightmare! Luckily, the guys in California who manufacture the hard drive were able to retrieve everything and it was back in the editing suite within three days! Close call!

Today, Kenneth and I sat down for three hours and worked on notes from yesterdays editing and the film took a definite turn for the better. Scenes play into each other so much better when we switched the middle section of scenes around and now with Kenneth's 'ears' as well as his eyes working overtime, the music is now also helping set the tone of the piece and allows us to bring a new side to the picture which was not there prior to adding sound. It just goes to show the upmost importance of how sound quality and choice of soundtrack provides the viewer with so much more...

Sitting in and editing this film has been a real eye opener. You get to see what does and does not work as far as scene transitions go. I also get a clearer picture of how good or bad a job I did of directing the actors in regards to pacing et al. When you see these scenes play in order, creating your film as a whole it's a relief to see the directional pay-off during principal photography!

Tomorrow Kenneth will continue with the end of the film and additional editing on sound. Saturday we will get together in the afternoon and view the latest edit and then work from there. There may be a possibility of having to shoot two additional scenes but I won't be able to decide that until I see the latest edit this weekend. If so, then I think we may need one more short night to shoot two scenes and some establishing shots of the thunder and lightening storm.

Onwards and upwards...