Monday, January 07, 2008

Embracing Editing - Into Action

Today was the day. I had no reason or excuse at the ready not to cut the stuff we shot on Saturday. My idea is to cut some of these exercises to get back in the groove rather than add the pressure of my hopes for the success of other projects to the already daunting practice of editing. The weird thing is that when I started filmmaking, editing was one of the things I most readily embraced. I don't know why I I disconnected from it.
I do know that once I get all the footage in, I'm kind of eager to get cutting without really getting cozy with the footage. In short, I want to get ahead of myself. That usually typifies naivete or insecurity. I wish I could claim naivete, but I'm going to have to cop to the latter. Then there's laziness. It's a lot of effort to expend for nothing in return. No direct material compensation that is.
I fought off some minor anxiety and kept at it. It's especially tough to track improvisational footage. Eventually it started to take shape, though not until I went upstairs and washed some dishes. Maira Kalman's antidote for confusion.
For those of you that aren't regular readers of Finding Fellini, I theorized recently that editing could be another antidote for confusion. I wouldn't say that's happened right out of the gate. Hence the actual dishwashing break. Lo and behold, it was immediately after washing dishes that I was able to begin laying down an assembly. It was sunny today so I said just start the assembly and work at it for an hour and then go for a walk. Next thing you know two hours had passed.
There were several points that really made me laugh watching the footage. Both actresses are really there for each other. Christy did a wonderful job of externalizing her inner life, both with making her native language foreign and staying true to her objective. October listens so well as if what she's hearing is truly for the first time. We didn't slate and often I can't tell what the order of the takes was based on her performance. She externalizes the internal shift of making a life-changing decision well. I'm not entirely sure I was able to preserve it in the edit. Which might be a clue to go back and make that a priority if I did indeed sacrifice emotion for rhythm and, or continuity. Fresh eyes, both mine and someone else's will help.
In the end I found that covering improv is difficult, especially in a two-hander that you can't do much overlapping dialogue to motivate cuts. There isn't enough movement in the table scene to make all of the cuts as seemless as I'd like. I can't think of anything at present to remedy the problem in the future so I've created a wonderful example to show people and get some imput on how to improve my shot selection. What I did was frame a nice over the shoulder composition and then matched it when we turned around. It gives me no eye trace or graphic match when cutting back and forth.
I will try to post all or at least some of the Happy New Year exercise on the blog in the next few days.

A River Dertchee,
Signore Direttore

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