Editing Begins

All of the footage from principal photography is logged and now in the editing suite. So, the long hours, days, weeks, and months of editing now begins. This weekend I'll be going over to our master editor's (Robbie Proctor) editing studio.

I've already seen the all of the footage at least one time through during the dubbing process. I'm really excited by the performances and the visuals are amazing, even without any of the standard processing. People who have already gotten glimpses of small pieces of the footage are already saying it looks like a magical production. :)

I'm really happy with the coverage (ie: performances and variety of camera angles) that we were able to get during principal photography. I wanted the film to be shot with a fairly standard structure of camera angles. Cliff Traiman (DP) is a total genius and the composition and lighting of every shot is beautiful.

Cliff and his crew were really fast too which helped with our tight schedule. It was kind of crazy, shooting 25 different locations over 19 days. But, the whole cast and crew were fantastic worked through everything like the pros that they are. :)

Finishing logging. Next step: assembly edit.

Logging

This weekend the logging of all of the footage will be done. We shot about 27-28 hours of footage during principal photography.

For those unfamiliar with the "logging" process, this is where the information of each take is entered into the editing system that contains information such as the what type of shot (ie: establishing shot, close-up, etc), sound notes, good take/bad take, etc. Right now, it's taking about 2.5 hours to log each hour of footage. This step is essential for quickly going through the footage during the editing stage.

Assembly Edit

Next weekend we will begin putting together the assembly edit.

For those unfamiliar with the assembly edit, most filmmakers will tell you that this is one of the most depressing stages of the entire process. The assembly edit is essentially just all of the scenes quickly put together in an extremely rough form: raw live sound, no music, potentially a rough blocking of camera angles or just a single shot for a scene.

Watching an assembly cut is like watching a video that a stranger has made by walking around their boring uncle's birthday party and just taping random people's conversations, people that you don't know. In watching the birthday video, you can start picking out interesting characters from the party and start thinking about how to tease out some of the parts of the relationships you'd like to focus on, identify some nice moments, and generally get the sense that there is a birthday party going on. :)

New "Behind the Scenes" photos..

We've just put up a series of "Behind the Scenes" photos by Jim Sullivan:

Broken Arrows - Behind the Scenes (Photographer: Jim Sullivan)