Our rough cut is now a smoother rough cut but it’s still about 2 hours long so we’re trying to figure out how to shave off 20 or 30 minutes which is not a lot if you are talking about driving from NY to LA but is a lot if you’re talking about a film.  Shaving off a few frames here and a few seconds there helps but at 24 frames/second, that’s around 28,000 frames so we have to start thinking about getting rid of whole scenes (as if we haven’t been thinking about that the whole time!).   With over a hundred thirty scenes you wouldn’t think that getting rid of a couple of them would be a big deal but every scene was so painstakingly produced with writing, locations, actors, community and family support, lighting, shooting, eating, memories, money etc., that it is a big deal.

So, what do you do?

You sit down in front of your film with someone that doesn’t have all of those personal associations and more experience than we’ll ever have.  In our case that person is Harry Keramidas (editor ‘Back To The Future’…yes, I know I’ve told you that before).


Harry dissects our cut in his editing suite.

Last week we sent Harry a dvd.  He loaded it into Final Cut Pro and cut it apart.  Then yesterday we drove to his home Western Mass and sat with him for 8 hours discussing which of the 28,000 frames we didn’t need.  We all decided on at least one scene we could save for the dvd bonus features (ie. cutting room floor) but I won’t say which one. 

 

‘Hap and Ashley’ is still our title for now.  We’re not sure when updating a working-title becomes an emergency so we’re continuing to add and subtract from our potential film name list…a list that we’ve managed to bring down below 200 possibilities.

 

Break-time at Yellowhouse World Headquarters…



…we edit a lot but not all the time!  

 See you in April!