I’ve been out of touch for a while because after wrapping I went immediately into directing an ambitious and complicated new musical at this year’s New York Fringe Festival (www.thebardybunch.com; featuring some key players from “The Adventures of Paul and Marian.”) The show closed on August 24th, and I was finally able to start editing the movie during the hurricane Irene weekend, when the city closed down but nothing else happened in NYC.
The editing started off quite easily; we shot the movie in such a way that I knew going into it which shots I wanted to use. And since we had only 10 days to shoot the feature, we’d get a take I liked, plus a safety in case something went wrong with that take, and then moved on. So there aren’t a lot of options to choose from or much that needs to be fixed in the edit.
But right now I’m editing scene 19, which is when Paul and Marian are hiding out at Paul’s Uncle’s place and Paul decides to go out into the world to make his fortune. The scene is quite long; it’s over 10 pages of script and includes Paul and Marian’s first duet and lots of running around. We used the length and depth of the entire soundstage to block this scene.
And here’s the problem: we shot this scene on our first day of shooting so it took a while to get into our groove. As a result, we have tons of footage for this scene – nearly 3 hours worth! (We shot with 2 cameras so it’s really just 1 ½ hours of footage captured from two different angles, but it’s still 3 hours of footage to choose from). Since there’s a lot of movement in the scene, both of the cameras and of the actors, there are constant focus issues. The lenses for the 7D are really precise, so if the camera or the actor is even very slightly off the mark, then we can lose focus. In this case I could possibly cut to the second camera, but sometimes the second camera is shooting the actor who isn’t talking, or has a piece of our film equipment in the shot. As a result, I’ve been piecing this scene together bit by bit, without thoughts of artistry or nuance.
This is what happens when you make a movie. You have thoughts of grandeur when you plan it, but when reality hits you have to deal with minute issues that take precedence over artistry.
I know from the footage of subsequent scenes that we won’t have this problem, but this is a reminder again of how difficult editing can be, and how brilliant editors often have to be, because they have to cover these things and make it look all effortless in the end. Hopefully those of you watching the finished scene 19 will find it effortless, but it’s certainly taking me a lot of effort right now to get close to that point.
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Tags: editing, filmmaking is hard, post
