Hmm, what can be said about the time in between this update and the previous one? I know it’s been quite a while since the last update. I spent the first two weeks of October setting up the sequences to make up the first rough cut of the film, and viewed it about a week later with my brother-in-law, who is himself a student of film and video as well as one of my crew members during production. I was looking forward to this for so many of the obvious reasons, the biggest one being the first chance to see the movie put together for the first time, which was a thrill.
What surprised me the most about the rough cut was that I was expecting it to be between 25-30 minutes long. It wound up being close to 40 minutes. Any filmmaker or film student knows that the general guideline is a page of script equals a page of screen time. The first draft of the script was about 30 pages. Personally, I’m thrilled that the final length of the rough cut was 40 minutes. There were a few things that I may need to change a bit just to punch the film itself up a bit as far as the picture is concerned, but for the most part, nothing needs to be re-shot at all, which is great. And there are no sequences that need to be cut out, as I was conscious that any sequences that we ended up shooting would be necessary to tell the story.
I’m very much looking forward to giving my cast and crew, as well as the rest of the world the first glimpses of the film’s story, largely through the teaser poster and trailer that I’ve been working on. (I use the term ‘world’ very loosely because both the teaser poster and trailer may not be seen by many people throughout the world, even through YouTube, but it’s cool to dream)
It’s gotten to the point in post-production where I need to worry about tweaking shots that may need effects work, and there are a number of them, but they shouldn’t be too hard. I’m also thinking about music, going as local with the music as I did with the cast and crew. I may have a small band tapped for the big action sequence in the film, and a potential song for the film as well. While none of that is set in stone, I am hopeful that something will work out with those areas. Then I have to worry about music for the other areas of the film that need scoring.
I also need to worry about ADR and Foley as well. That won’t be tough at all, for the most part. And it’ll be nice to clean up the audio that is currently being used as a guide track, then put in the re-recorded lines with better background sound to make everything sound natural.
Until next time, enjoy the surprises coming up.
