Editing Suite

Today I’m in the editing Suite for the second day. It’s been going a lot better than expected, actually. My fever broke during the night, before I started the editing and though my stomach is still giving me trouble, medicine has kept the pain from the spasms down, while will power (and enjoyment) has managed to keep me focused. True, pretty much the moment I arrived at the place I was staying last night I crashed out, not to wake up for ten hours, but that’s ok. It means I’m spending less money.

When I saw the original rough cut, which was done without me, I actually despaired. I broke down and believed that I had let everybody down and that everybody has mistakenly put their faith in me, when they obviously shouldn’t have. For two weeks I refused to look at, or think about, the short film that I’d been given. Then I realised that even if my short film might have let people down, what I was doing right there was certainly letting people down. So I bit the bullet.

My solution was to try and massacre my original script. The idea was to cut out as much as possible, so that even if it wasn’t good, at least people wouldn’t have to suffer through much of it. I actually thought I’d done a real good job cutting it down to half the length. Unfortunately, when we put it together in the editing studio it turned out I’d only managed to cut away about one third.

Still, I had managed to cut away some of the scenes that offended me most, as well as the verbosity that got to me in the original showing. Of course, now I’ve been stuck with my nose glued to the screen for many hours, seeing the same footage again and again, so there is a good chance I’m not objective, but at least I have the feeling it is better.

I’ve moved from never ever directing again (the decision I had made deep down inside) to maybe directing again, if somebody pushes me hard enough and gets me to agree while intoxicated.

The current version I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to show my friends.

It really was terribly unfair of me to leave others to edit my work. They didn’t feel right about cutting out scenes that didn’t work (they really stuck to the original script), nor did they exactly know what I had in mind with the different shots. They didn’t want to move shots around and they didn’t run with their own ideas. As a result, it was a compromise of what they wanted and what they believed I wanted. Compromises might work in politics, but they rarely work in art.

Still, if they hadn’t done what they had done, then I wouldn’t have realised what didn’t work and cut mercilessly into the script. Their work was immensely valuable for the simple reason that it showed me what didn’t work and sometimes eliminating what doesn’t work is the first step to finding out what does.

Hopefully all of you will get to see the short film soon.