I think of the assembly cut as the shapeless version of the movie. Here’s all the scenes, here are some good shots, we put them in order so you can see what we have to work with. But we’re not really looking at tension, the pace isn’t really there yet, and the moments are generally not built out.
In the rough cut, we get to dig deep into the story of each individual moment. We’re having this real conversations about motivations in the scene, how characters react to each other, what the turning point of the scene is, and how each character feels in their internal life.
I worked in theater before film, and in theater the director works extensively with actors. The assembly cut feels a little bit like when you get the script of the play: everything is there on the page, but it’s just words. The rough cut feels like a first runthrough with actors after weeks of rehearsal: we’re breathing life into the footage.
For the assembly cut, Prakshi and I decided to only work forwards. She’d send me scenes and sequences as she completed them, and I reviewed them and compiled my notes in an ever-growing document. I have to watch every new cut twice: I don’t always respond well to change, so I have one viewing to get my brain used to the changes, and then a second viewing to actually evaluate the scenes.
While I was compiling my assembly notes, Prakshi just moved on to the next scenes. She didn’t go back and incorporate any notes. We knew we just wanted a full cut of the film, so that she had a solid understanding of the major arc and pivotal scenes, and I had a strong understanding of what footage we really got.
With the rough cut, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve continued to go back and forth on scenes until we feel that they’re in good shape before Prakshi moves on to the next sequence. This means that the film is rapidly getting significantly better. Scenes have motion and tension, performances are incredibly nuanced, and we’re able to work the jokes until they land just right.
We got off to a slow start - we had a whole lot of conversations about the best way to open the film, and tried out many creative ideas for the character introductions. But now that we’ve gotten rolling, it’s awesome to see second, third, and even fourth drafts of sequences make up our rough cut. We highlight notes that are so tiny we think they’re just for the fine cut - but everything major is getting worked and reworked as we go.
The cut is becoming a movie.
