Day 4
The rough cut thrown together over Days 2-3 was, if I may say so, a decent start. (Editing a twelve-minute short film was a daunting enough project to grind through – but the thought of cutting a ninety-minute plus feature still shuts down various areas of my brain.)
A moment of self-discovery late in the morning: doing the rough cut myself has dealt to a hitherto unvoiced fear of not knowing if I have enough coverage or not, and the paralysis that would ensue. There is never enough coverage – and if you do have enough coverage, there are never enough takes to give you ‘options’. But instead of being paralysed, I was forced to try different approaches like new sequences and new narrative structures – finding new ways of telling the same story.
Where I had started Day 3’s rough cut of 27+ minutes, by the end of the day, I had reduced it to twelve minutes.
Day 5
Twelve minutes can still be an eternity. I’ve sat through ten-minute-long short films that have felt interminable. Although I want a deliberate pace for To’ona’i, I definitely didn’t want it to drag. The cut just didn’t drag for me. Despite numerous trims and nips here and there, they made only a few seconds difference.
Two sets of fresh eyes were railroaded into an impromptu screening. One pair liked the pacing and story and acting. The other pair thought the cinematography was the best thing since sliced pan. The cinematography has been getting such good press, I get a glimmer now of the attractiveness of a possessory credit:
CINEMA-GOER #2: But what composition of shots! The depth of field on the actors! The character of the lighting!
CINEMA-GOER #1: Why, yes, it was a pretty little thing. Who did it?
CINEMA-GOER #2: I dunno. But it’s a [POSSESSORY CREATIVE] film.
CINEMA-GOER #1: A mighty fine looking film, it was.
I took the cut to Mr Tripuraneni who pronounced it ‘good’ on arrival. He has since taken over: he’s going to tighten it up, clean up the audio and give it a quick grade. Despite his teasing about giving the whole film a hallucinatory feel – or possibly a Michael Bay-fired blur of images cut to Celine Dion warblings – I never once took the bait. I was too sick of watching and tweaking and watching and tweaking the footage.
He could do what he damned well liked.
Within reason.
Day 6
After I told The Goddess the joke about the sloth who’s mugged by a gang of delinquent snails (when asked at the police station what happened to him, the sloth says, I don’t know – it all just happened so quickly…), she pointed out that after a week of frowning and groaning and sighing at the hired MacBook screen, my mood had lightened considerably.
“Really?” I asked. She gave me Her look.
But I was having so much fun at the time.
