Okay, I sunk into the edit hardcore on this short film. I lost two and a half days into the obsessive mindset of just chopping, cutting, re-arranging, toying, technical concerns, and generally just total immersion. Been a very long time since I did that to such an extent. It felt good mentally and emotionally. My old body cannot handle that kind of thing at this level for long. I need more circulation, more physical activity. It was the years of this type of thing that brought me to where I am now health wise.
I had a 22 minute 40 second edit that I sent out to a handful of friends for notes. Within 2 hours of sending that, I ran through the timeline with my roommate and immediately went in and cut over 4 minutes out to a new run time of 17 minutes and 30 seconds. I deleted the initial cut and uploaded this new one and resent the link. Only one person had seen the original edit before getting this one.
The harshest critic in the world will always be me. I am brutal on my edits. I learned that very early on to never love your own material too much to cut it out if it’s not bettering the movie as a whole. An editor is there to serve the film itself and no one person’s ego. The movie becomes like an entity of it’s own, and everyone should work towards making it the subjective best it can be.
I have an arbitrary desire to keep the run time as close to 15 minutes. I don’t mind it going over as long as it is great. The longer the run time, the less likely it will be selected at festivals unless it is truly extraordinary. Again, never one to serve solely my own ego, I do not think this is THAT extraordinary to warrant the longer run time. At the same time, from all the notes and ideas I have been accumulating from friends and colleagues, the notion of adding more and new material is likely. I do want to make this the best short film that it can be and that will entail some pickup shooting and some additional trims too.
I took Sunday off from even looking at it. I need distance before attacking the edit once more. I find that when you really get down into it like I did, you can’t see the forest for the trees. Today, I am looking at the edit and trying to figure out ways to enhance, trim, change, re-arrange, and add to make this movie more whole. I am disappointed with myself for not seeing before that it’s missing an essential overall arc for the story and the characters.
On the upside, I get to completely justify all my recent tinkering on the original UNCLE PETE’S PLAYTIME clips as I have dived into the raw footage and have been using all the original timelines as the basis for making all new edits of them for the mockumentary with proper sound and music transitions so that they fit the new project better. I am completely grateful that I had already re-keyed all the greenscreen and kept all the raw unedited footage and the project files. It’s made this process move along like lightening.
0 Comments