At this writing, we’re within 20 minutes of the end of the film. This is more than a second pass - we’re poring over scenes, doing multiple drafts of them and discussing each moment before moving on. It’s taking shape, it’s telling a story, it’s creating performance arcs. It’s becoming a movie.
Because we’ve covered so much of the film, we’ve hit most of the “types” of scenes there are. We’re starting to learn which scenes are more challenging in the edit.
Generally, the big ensemble scenes in the first half of the film pose a technical challenge. We have a scene with 8 speaking characters, and they’re moving back and forth between the front porch and a car. We didn’t have time to get a close up on everyone; we got creative with the coverage and got people in moving two shots that changed throughout the scene. We got what we needed, and the cut’s looking really nice, but it was definitely a balancing act in the edit.
I wasn’t surprised there - we knew on set that scene would be tricky, and we made sure to start with a wide that encompassed enough action that large portions of the scene could be played in it. The wide was our kind of fail-safe if the close-ups and two-shots didn’t work for technical reasons. In the cut, we haven’t had to lean too much on the wide, but that was our plan on set.
The bigger surprise for me is the challenges in some of the smaller scenes, and I’m learning again how much actor movement changes the situation. In theater, it’s incredibly easy to have an actor cross. A long scene might start stage right, move center, back stage right, suddenly over to stage left, and back center. This is one of the ways we visually convey the changing relationship of the characters, and show what spaces they gravitate to when they feel threatened, tired, excited, etc.
In film, that kind of blocking is a nightmare. But for two long, small-cast scenes, we had important crosses that signify a shift in the relationship. These two scenes have now become fairly tricky in the edit, as we’re dealing with potential line jumps, changing backgrounds, and spatial continuity. I think this is compounded by the fact that they both take place in small(ish) rooms, and our widest lens was a 32mm.
Luckily, these aren’t two random, lengthy scenes - they’re long because they’re packed with emotional information. Because we knew they were crucial to the story and we’d have to nail performances, we allowed plenty of time to shoot them. I believe we allotted 6 hours to one scene, and more to the other. On a big budget set, that might not sound like a lot - but we shot 93 pages in 18 days. When we had six hours to shoot a single scene, it felt like a huge luxury.
The second half of the film quiets down and focuses in on our protagonists. There’s a huge tonal shift. Technically, it also means that we have more coverage of each of the performances, and more to choose from in the edit. It’s leading to some really exciting conversations and discoveries.
