Rough cut complete and website coming soon!

After several weeks we at last have our first cut of the film together! It's a genuine thrill to see everything hang together and the story as it was on the page now fully come to life on the screen. My editor Donovan de Souza worked extremely hard at molding the footage into an engaging narrative and I am deeply impressed with his work.

Over the past few weeks we worked methodically and chronologically through each scene, finally getting scene ten completed today. Overall editing was a fairly smooth experience, with the one exception of scene seven, which we soon realised was without a doubt the most complex in terms of on-screen action and coverage. After an incredibly intense and lengthy editing session, however, Donovan managed to pull it all into line and now scene seven is probably the tightest in the entire film.

Editing has once again made me deeply appreciative of my actors' excellent work during production, cutting Gita and StJohn's interaction in scene ten surprised both my editor and myself for the pure pleasure we got from watching it come together. The emotion and depth of feeling in the sequence is awesome and it now probably ranks as my favourite part of the film even though the coverage is mostly simple A/B stuff. Goes to show that a good performance from your actors can often outshine even the most impressive displays of technical wizardry.

We were both extremely excited today when we finally got to watch the whole film run from start to finish and, not content to sit on our laurels, immediately started working on tightening up the running time.

I'm really conscious of trying to hit that 15 minute running time for festival entry and today we managed to get the cut to 14 minutes and 58 seconds without credits. I am a little concerned about how much more we can afford to cut from the film without compromising the narrative, but I'm sure we can look into some creative solutions and hopefully the feedback from the industry locals next week will throw up a few good outsider perspectives.

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The promotional website for "Alice(remix)" is coming together at the moment and I'm very happy with the current designs, we're looking to launch in the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled. We've also got a raft of stills that have yet to see the light of day, as well as work on the trailer starting very soon!

Someday It'll All Make Sense: Getting The Rough Cut Together

So far my editor, Donovan De Souza and myself have had three sessions cutting and messing around with the footage and I have to say, going back over it all I'm mostly very happy with how it all came together. Editing has been an interesting experience, after all the abstraction and segmented progress of the shoot, it's great to have all the footage sitting there ready to be made into a story.

Donovan is agreeably obsessive about continuity and the flow from one cut to the next, (that's what I get for hiring an experimental filmmaker) and it is an absolute pleasure to work with him. I've noticed that because we're already such good friends, we have a very positive rapport and can make decisions very quickly with very little arguing. Thanks to the fact we have similar ideas about cinema I never feel like I have to force my editor to agree to an idea of mine.

So far we've cut the film up until scene seven. The running time currently stands at 9 minutes and I hope we can keep it around the fifteen minute mark when the picture is locked. Due to the way I structured the shooting of this film, the rhythm of the edit is what I would call 'measured'. We have a lot of on-screen action that is often caught in only a few shots, I didn't want to create a spastic over-edited picture, rather I wanted to create a mood through the actions and feelings of the character in the space and long unbroken shots were a way I hoped to achieve this. For example, all of scene two takes place in only a single slate.

One thing I've noted is that often films with rapid fire montage lose a lot of viable emotional drive, we end up being distracted by the technique rather than what's occurring in the narrative. This is something I really wanted to avoid. This is not an action film, this is a psycho-drama. If the audience isn't engaged by the character and the story, all the whiz bang cuts in the world aren't going to hold their attention.

So yeah, not long now till we have our first completed assembly of the film! I'm doing a screening in two weeks with several local industry types whose opinions I think could really help us when we come to the fine cut.