Revelations

I started digitising the footage from the shoot this week, then putting together a rough assembly of some of it. So far, I’ve covered about 2/3 of the script and the film’s already running at over 8 minutes, which is a bit longer than I’d anticipated. At the moment, I think I’m probably looking at about a 12 minute film – unless, of course, the story doesn’t work and I have to do some radical rewriting in the edit suite (always a possibility).

The assembly looks pretty good – the photography’s great and Matt’s performance is strong, but it’s at this stage that you start to get an idea of what you’re missing and maybe what you should have done differently. One scene is missing some quite essential sound because of the friendly local chainsaw twins who were cutting down trees just down the path from us for the duration of the scene, and there are a couple of close-ups I wish I’d thought of getting. I think the trouble was, because I was having to do sound (and art dept) as well as direct – and because we had so much to do in such a short space of time – that I didn’t really have a time to assess what we’d shot and what we still needed, I just had to rely on a general kind of instinct as to whether we’d got it or not.

Still, some stuff that we took a risk on seems to have panned out okay, and I’m sure I can fix the sound with some wild tracks and foley work (which I quite enjoy anyway). The interesting thing now is whether the story works in the way that I intended – that’s the weird thing about the edit, although it’s a process of gradual assembly, it’s also one of gradual revelation – taking you back to the story, revealing what was on the page.

I think it’s going to take a while before it’s finished – I’m not going to be able to work flat out on the edit, so it’s going to be fitted in amongst other stuff – but I do really need to get it out of the way before I start on ‘Deliver Me’ – although that project has been moving at such a glacial pace that it could be another six months before I have to do anything with it…