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.