I've heard people call editing "the invisible art," because if you do it well, most of your audience won't even know it happened.
There's some truth to that. There are no photos of post-production. There are no funny stories that come out of it. It's a one man job that occassionally takes a second opinion, and it's almsot always done late at night.
We just finished the first cut of Loss For Words Act 1, and have already fielded a few hundred questions about "what's taking so long."
What's taking so long
Editing is the time when we make or break the movie. I like to say a good editor can make a good movie out of solid footage. A great editor can take messy, sloppy, disjointed footage, and rescue it from the mistakes made on set.
Of course, we try to be organized (and we really are), we try to get everything right while we're filming (and we do pretty well), but we know there will always be one little error we missed.
To keep our choices open, and make sure we have enough flexibility to work around problems, we shoot way more footage than we need. Every filmmaker does multiple takes and multiple angles, but we've turned the phrase "one more time" into a running gag, because, well, we never do something just once more.
On average, we wind up with 15 minutes of footage for every minute of movie. I would never shoot a film any other way -- we need that flexibility.
But here, all that extra footage is a double edged sword. Yes, we desperately need those extra takes available to us, but when Randy goes to edit, he has to watch and take notes on all of it.
He marks the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that might work, and weighs little details in performances with the flow of the scene.
The result is something smooth that captures the performances at their best and flows bits of different takes together so it all looks natural.
The Toys
The technologists in the room are already asking, "what do you edit on?" In the past, we've used Pinnacle Studio -- which is really designed for birthday videos with big blue titles that read "it's a boy!"
We pushed it to its limit, but after we finished Salad Daze, we knew we needed to move onto something better.
Today we use Avid. Life is better.
Next steps
As Randy puts the rough cut together, he sends the other producers each scene for comments. These days he rarely lets errors into a cut unless there's a good reason for them - i.e., picking the lesser of two evils. Our feedback has more to do with nuances, how the scene turned out, how it fits in the story, and so on.
When we have a complete rough cut, Randy and I will meet up to run through it with a fine tooth comb. Every little detail gets a second look to see what we can improve on, and when we're happy with this, I take over for sound production.
Of course, this is another matter altogether.
Point being, the premiere of Loss For Words is coming. We just have a lot of work to do first.
