We got the Avid project with synced audio from the assistant editor last week, and Prakshi and I have officially started assembling the film.
After watching the dailies in log, just seeing the footage with a LUT on it feels amazing. Plus, seeing our actual movie up in Avid is just exciting!
Prakshi is assembling the first half of the movie, and I am assembling the second half. I think more will fall on Prakshi later down the road, but for now it makes sense for each of us to tackle half the film. It’s an overwhelming amount of work for one person. I assembled six minutes of cut footage this past week - it’s not an amazing six minutes of cinema, but you can now sit down and watch six minutes of a first draft of the movie, and that’s something.
It’s a bit bizarre to watch myself direct. I don’t mean that literally - I very rarely hear myself say anything other than “action” and “cut.” But I’ll be watching the footage, and feeling that a certain actor’s performance is strange in one beat, or that a line isn’t working. And then in the next take, poof! The performance or line has changed. On-set Lane saw the same thing that at-home Lane sees, and fixed it!
Of course, sometimes I remember the note I gave, and it’s frustrating to watch my past self work towards it. The last scene I edited was when Amy has a panic attack in Hal’s room. Hal’s response in the screenplay was weird - he just asks what is happening several times. Ray reacted clearly to the text, and played the confusion. The scene felt super weird. Watching through the footage was a little painful - because I can remember standing in that room, talking with Ray about how either of us would actually react in that situation, and how we had seen Hal react to crisis in previously shot scenes of the film.
We did eventually solve the problem of the scene - but I see now that the solution is only in Hal’s coverage. We don’t have Amy reacting to it specifically in her coverage (though I believe we will get away with this, because she is very isolated in her panic attack), and we don’t have it in the wide going into their flight from the room. I’ve cut together a solution for now, borrowing audio of the better lines from Hal’s coverage and putting them into Amy’s coverage, then only using the wide for them both running from the room. But to sit there through all the bad takes of the end of the scene, knowing now what the answer is!
