One Too Many Mornings - a new comedy.

One thing I learned from my days working in the Feature Film Program, is that the best independent films that went through the labs would save a little bit of energy at the tail end of the project to do pickup scenes. While this is sometimes viewed in a negative light – as if the filmmakers messed up the first time around and have to fix their stupid mistakes – I view this as an opportunity to take the film from good to better-than-good. (And, yes, also to fix my stupid mistakes.)

Editing a movie isn’t that much different than writing. The only difference is that you have a limited number of shots to “write” the movie with. And the film changes – I’ve written about this before, but it’s true: you learn what it wants to be. It resembles your script, but hopefully, it’s better. It’s kind of like a 12 year old boy going thru puberty. It’s growing, you can see the adult that’s waiting to come out, but there are definite awkward bits. It’s voice cracks every few sentences.

Some people just hack their way thru this – forcing the film to be less awkward through editing. Sometimes you have to do that due to budget or logistics. For us – we have the luxury of an insanely dedicated crew, and only internal deadlines, so we can take the time to make the film as best as we possibly can, but in a more natural way. Not only that – rather than just simply smoothing over any editing bumps – we can take this opportunity to look at our film as a whole and see what it needs, and give even more depth to our characters.

I’m running off to meet up with Stephen and Anthony so we can prepare for these reshoots next month. We’re not making it easy on ourselves – writing one scene in a moving car, and another with a large group of children. Wish us luck!

mike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.